Career Fitness: How to Build a Healthy Career in the HR Profession

Career Fitness: How to Build a Healthy Career in the HR Profession

Human Resource professionals devote a lot of time and energy to helping coworkers, recruitment candidates and others achieve their employment objectives and advance their careers. This feature has been expressly designed to help HR professionals do the same for themselves. It will explore the challenges and Best Practices of building a satisfying and rewarding career in the HR profession. The information provided in the feature is drawn from Peter Weddle’s book entitled <i>Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System</i>.

A Person of Multiple Dimensions

Walmart has just announced the results of a survey it did of changes in consumer behavior driven by the recession. Among its findings was this: parents are fast-tracking their toddlers’ toilet training to save money on diapers. Every little bit helps with today’s household budget, it seems, so there will be no more lingering around in your Huggies for little Jimmy and SallyAnn.

What does that shift in household behavior have to do with managing your career? While rushing a child’s toilet training might save money, doing the same for your professional development may well save your career. Achieving career security, especially in tough times, is a lot like riding a bicycle. You can coast for a short while, but eventually, you’re going to have to peddle, and the sooner you start to exert that effort, the farther you are going to be able to go.

Sadly, that’s exactly the opposite of what many people are doing today. They are hunkering down and hanging on, instead. It’s never too late, however, to start fast-tracking your professional development. The secret to doing so successfully is to see yourself not as a one-dimensional figure, but rather as someone who has two distinct and equally important dimensions. In other words, you want to get started right now on nurturing two core competencies.

What are those two dimensions? You want to re-imagine yourself as:

A work-in-progress. No matter how senior or experienced you are in the HR field, find an area where you aren’t as up-to-date as you can be and work on remediating that situation. Take a course from your local community or four-year college. Or, enroll in an online course, if that’s more convenient. The key is to find a way to acquire genuine understanding and skill. It’s not enough to drop in on a related program being presented at a local association meeting. That certainly won’t hurt, of course, but to add to your competency as an HR professional, you need sustained in-depth instruction.
A career athlete. In today’s (and tomorrow’s) uncertain times, career expertise is not enough to ensure career security. You can be accomplished in every facet of the HR profession and still find yourself out on the bricks looking for a job. The only way to protect yourself is to bolster your occupational expertise with an equally as complete knowledge of career self-management. Building up the strength, endurance and reach of your career doesn’t happen by serendipity or because your employer, your boss or your mentor does it for you. It’s something only you can do, and you must take the initiative to do it. There is a body of knowledge and set of skills involved in successfully directing a career, and you must both acquire that competencyand use it in your daily work routine if you are to achieve a career with appropriate meaning and rewards.

Why should you fast-track this training? Because the ‘come as you are job market” is gone forever. That market lasted for over 50 years, so many of us have come to rely on it. We know how it works and how to make it work for us. If you found yourself unemployed, you simply updated your resume, sent it out to a bunch of employers, did a little networking around the edges and badda bing-badda boom, you would typically find a new position that was equal to or even better than the one you had lost. That happy outcome, unfortunately, is never going to happen again.

As we know from our own work in HR, employers are no longer satisfied with qualified applicants for their openings. They believe that their own survival in today’s highly integrated and competitive global marketplace depends upon their ability to find and hire the best qualified candidates. They seek employees who can contribute from day one, contribute at a level higher than the norm, and contribute in a way that encourages everybody else around them to perform at a higher level, as well. You can be that kind of person. In fact, you are that kind of person. But only if you re-imagine yourself as someone with multiple dimensions of talent: you are a work-in-progress, a perpetual student of the HR profession, And you are a career athlete, a highly skilled master of your own destiny in the workplace.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

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