This is not your ordinary career site.

Most people think managing your career is about finding the next job or tweaking your resume. Other pundits hand out stupid career advice such as “looking busy” when there is nothing to do – and “spending more hours at work” while doing it.

If you think that is the advice you’ll receive here, you will miss 95% of what makes a great career. Plus, my viewpoint here is the knowledge worker toiling away in the common corporate cubicle. Not some rah-rah management site looking to motivate the mere mortals working in cubes.

The reality is your career consists of five interrelated areas – all of which need to hum to reach that vaulted status of Cubicle Warrior – a person who not only survives, but thrives working in a cubicle.

Brilliant Career Basics

The most important influence on your career right now? Your current job. Yet, we too often don’t know how to negotiate goals with our manager to avoid the performance review traps. We don’t know how to communicate our performance effectively. We avoid writing our self-reviews and don’t have an effective task management method that keeps our work on track. We punt our ability to influence our performance rating when our performance review is one of the critical scores we need to manage our career.

Keeping the Castle

We work hard for our money. We work for us and our families. Yet, in these dangerous times, a company will lay you off in a cold blooded minute. In a world where companies go bankrupt in a week and billions go for bailouts, navigating your career has never been so fraught with peril.

But when the hard times come, you need to ready to face the layoff – the emotional, relationship and financial needs that help you keep your castle – your savings and relationships you hold dear.

Cubicle Warrior Networking

Here’s the truth: you next job will most likely come from someone you know. They will know of the position or they know someone who knows about the position and are able to recommend you for it. Not job boards, not sending 5000 resumes, but someone you know. Corporations don’t care about your career – they hire you for your skills to give the corporation earnings for shareholders. Only people care about you and your career – and your networking practice is the key prospecting tool for your career.

Managing Management

Since your current job is the biggest influence on your career right now, it follows the most important person influencing your career right now is your manager. We often don’t understand how management works, how to communicate with our manager, how to negotiate goals or present to management.

Worse, we don’t see the patterns of management’s mismanagement that would tell us it is time to leave our position before our world blows up.

Personal Branding

Our objective is to get hired without the hiring manager ever bothering to look at our resume. We do that through the professional reputation we bring to our work. Whether you like it or not, you have a personal brand right now. What we need to do is shape that brand to the one you want to portray to the market.

In short, you need advanced, practical advice on how to manage the knowledge worker career. Someone who recognizes you are competing with everyone else on the planet for work. You need a new set of career skills where your resume is irrelevant. You need to know how to build your own skills and performance to increase opportunities for your career.

Welcome to my world. Let me help you become a Cubicle Warrior.