Thursday, December 24, 2015

Keep your eye on long-term goals



Probably the WORST career advice to ever be given to a Scanner is this one

Keep an eye on your long term goals. 

 

What goals?

Scanners find it very hard to create goals, let alone attain them. 

Scanners want to be able to work either in a variety of jobs or work with a variety of people in order to continue to learn.

Very few Scanners know what they will be going in 2 years time, let alone 5 or 10 years.

In terms of Goals for Scanners, the trick is to NOT go looking for your dream job. Don't get sucked into one niche.

Instead Scanners should look for the job that gives them the MOST OPTIONS in the future.

Which means they need to be thinking about how they can be leveraging the skills they already have, into a position that will allow them to learn the skills they don't have.

Barbara Sher tells Scanners to find what she calls a "Good Enough" job.

By this she means a job that is not too boring  but one that brings in enough money for scanners and their families to live on.

As a Scanner I have had my share of "good enough" boring jobs and "good enough" interesting jobs.

The most boring job I had was spending 3 years at a telephone call centre dealing with angry customers day after day. They called in complaining that their phones had gone faulty,or they had  stopped working or whatever. I eventually took Severance pay to leave that position.

The most interesting position I have had so far was with a media monitoring company - also called a press clipping service.  This job was interesting because it allowed me to read, but I also had to stop and mark up newspaper and magazine articles for the clients who would be interested in that specific article. I also had to read EVERY article, not just the ones that interested me. I never really learnt any new skills as a reader, but I stayed there for 6 years because the job was stable and interesting.  

There will be NO post tomorrow, since it is Xmas Day. I need a break. Thanks. 

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