You’d be skeptical, right? I know I would.

The big problem with experts is that they often can eloquently express a particular point of view. Not necessarily your point of view, of course, but a point of view.

Terry Starbucker of Ramblings From a Glass Half Full notes we all should “Beware of Experts” because they tend to frame everything they are ‘expert’ about into absolutes with little or no variation.

Because we are skeptical, where do we often turn for advice on career management? Our cubemates. Our friends. Our family members. The corporate web site.

Yes, we turn to people who often have little insight into what is really needed for career management — or, as a corporation, have a completely different set of objectives for what is “right” for us as employees.

People read my articles that I’ve published here on Cube Rules and believe that I’m an “expert” on career management. I’m not. I’m merely more than a disinterested observer willing to learn what it takes to succeed in Planet Corporation.

But since I’m willing to try and define a Cubicle Warrior who wants to thrive in corporations, willing to read about the latest trends like video job descriptions and resumes, willing to check out the latest career management tools, and try to fit all of those things into some coherent whole for the person working in a cube, I have a bit more knowledge than many about what it takes to manage a career today.

An expert, in my view, is a person who is willing to learn with a beginner’s mind.

So my suggestion is this: build a framework for your career management by reading what the “experts” say you should do for managing your career. Test that framework and add real life examples to validate the framework by discussing it with your co-workers, friends, family, and checking out web sites. Synthesize all of this into what you need to do to effectively manage your career.

When you get to the point where you have too much information from too many sources and are being forced to synthesize what you researched into something that makes sense for you…you’ll become an expert as well. For your own career.

Be skeptical of experts — yet, be your own expert in career management.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Career Management Requires Financial Management
2. Career Management Requires Knowing How Work Works
3. Become a Subject Matter Expert in three steps

Darlene asked me to guest post about a couple of tools that I use for Career Management: Jibber Jobber and LinkedIn.

I’m not going to talk about the specific tools here; check that out over at Technology for Career Management.

But, what I didn’t cover in the article is why we should be using a tool for career management in the first place. It’s an important subject.

The world has changed from twenty — or five — years ago. How people make and keep relationships has changed. Where twenty years ago a person was expected to stay with the same company for a very long time, if not life, today we are constantly moving between companies to perform our work. Or countries.

This dramatic change in the workplace has meant that relationships have become much more transactional than in the past. We interact with our neighbors — until me move. We interact with parents at our children’s school — until we change schools. We interact with our co-workers — until we change companies through voluntarily moving or being laid off.

We have become relationship transients at the very time we need to build and maintain strong networks in our life — because corporations are no longer responsible for our career management.

Here are five reasons to use technology for our career management:

1. Develop our personal brand. There is a lot of chatter about personal brands and how to build them being published right now, but the critical thing is to know your core strengths and be able to express those strengths to others. Career management tools can help you do this.
2. Target companies to work. Companies come and go and the work goes along with them. One day a Microsoft is the cool place to work and the next day it is Google. As you understand your work and what you like to do, certain companies will stand out as a place to work. A career management tool should help us focus on particular companies to work.
3. People are geographically disbursed. This means you won’t run into your old mentor at that other company at the grocery store and have a few minutes to catch up. It means your mentor at the other company is now working in a different country. So how do you remember to keep in contact? Through technology.
4. Job campaigns are harder. While it used to be you could find out about jobs at other places through your personal, physical social network, you now have job web sites, recruiters, company job sites — and nothing to keep track of what you have done or not done with a particular company relating to a job search. Technology should help with this tracking.
5. Unfocused tasks don’t get done. By having a technology tool to help you manage your career, you will have to maintain the information (and be reminded of things to do based upon tasks you enter). While this is work, the deal is that this is work that now needs to be done by you to help your career. No one else will do this for you. Consequently, managing through a tool is an effective method for career management.

You still need to do the work, of course. You still need to perform. But no one is watching out for you except you. So build — and manage — your network for all the right reasons. Your network will have great rewards far beyond those associated with finding a job.

Scot

Related posts:

1. 3 reasons job skills require technology tool skills
2. Technology is Great; Technology Sucks