Your professional core capabilities are learned and innate capabilities. These differentiate you to colleagues, employers, and clients.
Are you relying on core capabilities which defined you yesterday to fuel your career and leadership trajectory today and tomorrow?
First, let’s say your resume indicates that your greatest professional core capabilities are moving to another job with the same functionality every 18 months.
Ask yourself: what is the story your resume tells employers, colleagues, and clients? Even before you interview, your aspirational and relational goals are clearly communicated. You target a new job, more money, lateral movement, same responsibilities, accountability, and functionality. Oh, and also you are a high probability flight risk.
Thus, you frequently repurpose the same professional core capabilities into new business environments. Consequently, what transient value will each new employer anticipate your bringing to their business table? What type of customer and employee experience will you create during your tenure?
Next, let’s say your resume showcases your acumen within a specific function, department, or division.
Over time, your resume chronology reinforces that you have held a number of similar positions as a retained and productive employee. So, not a flight risk and thus, more organizationally valuable. However, in spite of employment longevity, promotability is elusive and you move on. Or, perhaps you grow professionally complacent and bored after a while.
Thus, you feel professionally confined. Except now, you accrue serious credibility and success within a specific functional role. As a result, you get stuck seeking more of the same roles, because it is easier to do. And less professionally risky for you to explain to new employers.
However, consider that your next employer may be hoping you do just that: take a risk and bring more of what is new and next. Instead of more of the same.
Because in this scenario, you ask each new employer to make another 3-5 year investment in you. Yes, you return more of the usual value to their business table. Yet, in their eyes, you have an expiration date of your own design. What additional value can you co-create together, to keep each other challenged, interested, and innovative?
Do either of these scenarios describe you? Then, consider how your present career strategy preserves professional core capabilities that have you good and stuck in professional mud.
However, identifying your met and unmet and unfulfilled professional core competencies allows you to better articulate unique perspectives and qualities you bring to each job. Why continue relying only on the professional tools and skills you wield? There is far more to you, and your story, than those core capabilities.
Otherwise, relying on resume chronology to demonstrate the value of your professional story falls short of fulfilling your as-yet undefined professional goals. Do you trust the professional story you currently tell? Because if you do not trust your professional story, no one else will either. And your next job ends up looking a lot like all the others.
When you move one millimeter beyond what is professionally comfortable today, you seek more diverse and challenging functionality tomorrow. Let’s get to where you really want, and need, to go tomorrow and moving forward, together. A great place to start is trusting your own story, first and foremost. Because if you do not trust your story, no one else will, either.
Contact me here to discuss how to re-define the value you bring to the business table because of who you are, not just what you do.
Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.
Babette Ten Haken | Change Catalyst | Purpose-Driven Professional Innovation | Cross-Functional Team Leadership | Trust-Based Client Retention | In Person & Virtual Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |
Babette Ten Haken leverages storytelling to translate the value of change and build trust across people and professional disciplines. When you lead teams and clients co-invested in the strategic business and human capital value you bring to the table, everyone gets to where they need to go, together, one millimeter at a time. Babette serves people, teams, and organizations wrestling with the impact of 4th Industrial Revolution Technology change on legacy 3rd Industrial Revolution business and hiring models. She is a business-oriented STEM professional, Voice of the Customer facilitator, MCCT™ certified, and a Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality) focused on new product development, professional innovation, cross-functional leadership, and client retention. Babette holds dual degrees from both Washington University, St. Louis, MO and University College, London, UK. She is a member of ASQ, SHRM, PMI, and the National Speakers Association. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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