Defining the Goal in the Cure for Career Insanity

Defining the Goal

Are you defining the goal for your next job change? What do you want to run towards in your next job? What do you want in your next job that at least fixes what you are running away from?

Have you made a job change before and, after awhile, you get the feeling you have been there before?

For example, when I graduated from college and went to work for IBM, I was put in an office and handed a coding pad. My job for weeks on end was to code in assembly language programs for transforming documents from one format to another. Ugh!!! I could not sit there and do that task for hours on end without human interaction.

Twenty years later, I followed my manager out of a Briefing Center (where I had presented to customers for six or so years) to be an IT consultant. I was then handed a laptop and told to create technical specifications for hours on end in a little cubicle with little human interaction. Ugh!!!

I did not define the goal. I did not define ahead of time what I really wanted!

In the first example, I lasted three years and was miserable. The second time, I lasted less than a year and was miserable.

What I wanted—and more importantly needed—was human interaction. When I made this move, I did not take this into account.

Similarly, when I left my first position at IBM, I specifically chose a group because of their manager. Six months into the new position, my manager was re-assigned. My next manager was better than what I had experienced previously, but…

When looking for that next job, role, or career, you will want to understand the culture of the organization regarding management rotation. If you work for a large entity like Dell, IBM, etc., you can be pretty sure things will be reorganized on a regular basis.

What I will be discussing in the coming week is coming up with a filter that we can use to evaluate new opportunities. That filter will be based on what you need in a boss, team, environment, rewards…

In step #1 of the Cure for Career Insanity, we talked about defining the problem . Why did you want to leave your current position.

In step #2 we want to define the goal!

What do you want in your next job in the following areas:

• Boss


• Team


• Rewards


• Variety


• Structure/Rules


• Activity


• Emotional Environment

What do you really want? Which are the most important for you?

I will be blogging in the coming weeks about the components of step #2, defining the goal, in the cure for career insanity!

Does this sound interesting? Are you suffering from Career Insanity?

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