Chosen the wrong career path? Feel like you have more to offer? Resent how your work controls your life? Hate your boss?
Most of us can think of a time when we experienced strong feelings of dissatisfaction with our role or work environment,resenting work’s influence over our life. Fortunately, we don’t need to resort to murder to attempt to solve the problem! On the other hand, many people can feel powerless or unmotivated to manage their career and life.
It’s our experience that up to ninety percent of people indicate feeling a lack of control over their careers, yet only five percent feel able or motivated to do something about it. This begs the question: why?
It could be that it’s a lot easier to stay in our comfort zone and not think about it too much. Maybe we’re scared that if we do something, we might fail, or we’re not even sure what the first step is. After all, it’s a lot more fun, and a whole lot less confronting, to watch the latest reality or crime show on TV, enjoy sport, surf the net or even clean out the kitchen cupboards, rather than explore other work options. Like anything in life, effectively managing our own career takes some time — but not as much as you might think — effort and continuous learning to explore options, identify opportunities, make decisions and ultimately achieve our desired outcomes.
Personally, we believe in the power of taking responsibility for our own careers, whether that means keeping a job that we love, making a career change or simply learning new skills to increase our employability. This is equally important in buoyant markets or in harsh economic times with large scale job losses. We also believe that career management can be fun! With this philosophy in mind, read on to learn how easy it is to develop and implement your own actionable career strategy.
SEEFAR: A quick overview of best practice career management
SEEFAR is a practical and results-driven process that merges the best features of the traditional plan-and-implement approach to career development with a new focus on having our own narrative and using action learning to gain clarity on what the best career opportunities are for us in order to feel successful and fulfilled.
How to Get Ahead Without Murdering Your Boss takes an innovative approach to career theory and practice, opening the book by using a crime fiction short story as a vehicle to illustrate the methodologies and personality types one encounters in work organizations. After all, who hasn’t wanted to murder their boss at some point? The story focuses on character types, providing a summary of their issues and career strategy, explaining the six SEEFAR action steps in the context of the story. You have the opportunity to identify with one or more of the characters and, by reading the steps the character takes, understand how you can use the methodology in your own personal circumstances. The book provides specific exercises that can be easily implemented by you into your day to day working life.
