In this book, Managing Your Career, Sean McPheat gives readers a practical plan on how to go about taking control of their careers, no matter what field they are in. Sean is the Founder and Managing Director of MTD Training. He has asked readers to identify their interests and passions by taking self-tests and other simple exercises. This book is not just a pep-talk but a practical guide on how you can improve your professional life and achieve your goals.

–Harrison

Managing Your Career

Contents

1	Introduction
1.1	Your Career Is in Your Control
1.2	Your Interests and Passions
1.3.	Identifying Our Strengths and Weaknesses
1.4	Enhancing Your Skills
1.5	Job-Search Skills
2	Determining Your Interests and Passions
2.1	Introduction
2.1	Exercise One
2.2.	Exercise Two
3	Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses
3.1	Introduction
3.2	Identifying What a Job Requires
3.3	Identifying General Strengths and Weaknesses
3.4	Getting Feedback from Others
4	Communication Skills
4.1	The Importance of Communication
4.2	What Is Communication?
4.3	What Are Communication Skills?
4.4	The Communication Process
4.5	Elements of Communication
4.5	Face to Face Communication
4.6	Listening Skills
5	Personal Confidence
5.1	Introduction
5.2	Self-Confidence
5.3	Self-Esteem
5.4	Self-Efficacy
6	Motivation
6.1	Introduction
6.2	Addressing Lack of Confidence
6.3	Addressing Lack of Focus
6.4	Addressing Lack of Direction
6.5	Building Self-Discipline
6.6	Goal Setting
7	Emotional Intelligence (EI)
7.1	Introduction
7.2	Mixed Model of EI
8	Job-Seeking Skills
8.1	Introduction
8.2	Your Resume
8.3	Networking
8.4	Interview Skills
9	References

Preface

Do you have a career path? Do you know exactly what you want in terms of your career? Do you know
what you’ll be best suited to?

All of these questions need answering if you want a happy and fruitful career. You spend a great
proportion of your life at work so it pays to choose and manage your career wisely!

In this textbook you will work through a series of exercises and content so that you will be able to plan and map out a rewarding career for yourself.

Sean McPheat, the Founder and Managing Director of management development specialists, MTD Training is the author of this publication. Sean has been featured on CNN, BBC, ITV, on numerous radio stations and has contributed to many newspapers. He’s been featured in over 250 different
publications as a thought leader within the management development and training industry.

MTD has been working with a wide variety of clients (both large and small) in the UK and internationally for several years.

MTD specialise in providing:

• In-house, tailor made management training courses (1-5 days duration)
• Open courses (Delivered throughout the UK at various locations)
• Management & leadership development programmes (From 5 days to 2 years)
• Corporate and executive coaching (With senior or middle managers)

MTD provide a wide range of management training courses and programmes that enable new and
experienced managers to maximise their potential by gaining or refining their management and
leadership skills.

Our team of highly skilled and experienced trainers and consultants have all had distinguished careers in senior management roles and bring with them a wealth of practical experience to each course. At MTD Training we will design and deliver a solution that suits your specific needs addressing the issues and requirements from your training brief that best fits your culture, learning style and ways of working.

Our programmes are delivered when and where you need them! We believe that training should be fun, highly interactive and provide “real world” practical techniques and methods that you can use back in the office – and that’s exactly what we provide.

1 Introduction

1.1  Your Career Is in Your Control

Each one of us has the ability to control the path that our careers take. It requires that we become truly self-aware so that we can identify what our own interests and passions are – what will truly make us happy in our careers. Then we must be able to fully face our own strengths and weaknesses so that we can ameliorate the ways in which we might be blocking our own career progress. Next, it’s important to hone some skills that are important to career advancement such as communication skills, self-motivation skills and goal-setting, and a relatively modern skill set called Emotional Intelligence. Finally, you’ll need some practical job-search skills, like understanding how to write a resume and how to stand-out in the interview process.

1.2 Your Interests and Passions

Are you truly happy in your current career path? Many of us spend our lives doing work that we don’t truly enjoy. We do it because we need to pay the bills, put food on the table, keep a roof over our heads. But if we are intentional about it, we can discover what type of work will provide for our financial needs and will be fulfilling as well.

1.3. Identifying Our Strengths and Weaknesses

Since no one is perfect, we all have weaknesses as well as strengths. But when you look at your
weaknesses honestly, you transform them into areas that you can work on to improve your own career potential. You’re managing yourself in order to help manage your career. For example, imagine you are unorganized or have issues with time management. You can learn how to become more organized and to become a masterful manager of your time. If you have a hard time working with a certain kind of person- and we all do – what would you normally do about it? Get angry, suffer over it, wish you were somewhere else? What if you could learn to look at that as your own weakness rather than as the other person’s fault, you suddenly have a power to do something about it – something that you didn’t have before. This is all part of an honest inventory of our strengths and weaknesses with an intention of moving our career forward.

1.4 Enhancing Your Skills

In the next few chapters, we’ll examine some skills that are important for managing your career because they will do two things: make you more desirable as a job candidate and keep you in a positive attitude and well-motivated to continue managing your career. Some of these skills are also useful in your everyday life and your relationships outside of work. We’ll look at:

• Communication skills
• Motivation skills
• Emotional intelligence

1.5 Job-Search Skills

In order to manage your career, you need to manage which jobs you pursue. Gone are the times when a person would start and end their career with the same company. Instead, people who truly manage their careers are strategic about which jobs they take and why. They look at each position as a rung in a ladder, not as a permanent destination. To be good at changing jobs, you need to be good at getting them. Which is why we’ll examine some techniques to help you in your job search. The more you practice these skills, the easier you will find job hunting to be.

2. Determining Your Interests and Passions

2.1 Introduction

Each of us has activities and areas in life that we are passionate about. Yet few of us are able to spend our careers pursuing something that truly holds our interest. The need to make a living, the desire for security, and the pressures of society often make us choose a career path that is not truly fulfilling. Unfortunately, we can spend a lifetime doing something that we don’t actually enjoy.

Now imagine for a moment that you were able to spend that same career time doing something that you are passionate about. Something that, when you woke up in the morning, you actually looked forward to doing. How would life be different for you? Managing your career should be, at least in part, about finding a career that you truly enjoy. The benefits are manifold. You will be happier, which will make you  healthier. Which in turn will make you able to have a generally higher quality of life.

If you don’t know what you are passionate about or what your interests really are, there are all kinds of tests out there that you can take. One famous test you may have taken is the Myers-Briggs. But we’ll do two rather simple exercises to see if you can get a clearer idea of the type of career that will be the best fit for you.

2.1 Exercise One

First, on a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, list the things in life that are most important to you. List people, things, ideals, activities – whatever it is that is very important to you and to your personal happiness. For example, a list might look like this:

•  Family
• Health
• Integrity
• Friends
• Work
• Church
• Pets
• Reading
• Children
• Painting
• Travel

Now on the right-hand side, list your strengths and skills. Think about things you know how to do from a work or knowledge perspective, and that you actually enjoy doing. So your list might look something like this:

• Working with people
• Training others
• Learning new skills
• Supervising others
• Understanding complex ideas
• Solving problems
• Writing
• Public speaking
• Helping people
• Working with my hands

Now, take a moment to compare the two lists for some areas that cross-over. For example, if you enjoy working with your hands and are good at training others, and you know that working with children brings you joy, what kind of careers could you follow that would allow you to do all of those things? If you enjoy helping others and you enjoy pursuing better health, what kind of a career could you have that would allow you to do both?

There are no right answers here – this is a brainstorming exercise to get you to start thinking outside of whatever career path you might already find yourself on. It doesn’t mean that you have to change the current career path that you have been following – but it might point you to ways that you could enjoy your current career path more. Perhaps you could focus on developing a new skill set that will allow you to take advantage of the experience you have but apply it to a new role. Just think creatively – how can you combine your passions and your skills into a career you would love?

2.2. Exercise Two