Career Management: The Key to Unlocking Your Full Potential

Career Management is one field that is either looked down on, or highly misunderstood. Many graduates are either still looking for job after years of graduation or move from one job to another believing that it is great way to get skills or in common parlance ‘to gain experience’. A person jumping from one job to another has no experience to gain. Some careers are great, some are average and some careers are dead. Make no mistake about it, a job is not the same as a career. However, inside a career there may be a job. A professional with a great career may be without job for a period, but because he has a great career, a big job soon comes his way. Career success is not because someone made a first class, distinction or second class upper degree or any other form of academic excellence, but it depends only on a well articulated, well implemented CAREER ROADMAP.
A career is what someone does throughout a life time based on skills, passion and professionalism. A career is characterized by:-

• Skills: There must be skills from technical, administrative and general knowledge
• Knowledge: received from academic and technical training, apprenticeship • Passion: this may drive a career different from what one studied in the higher academic institution
• Professionalism: must be a member of a professional body that regulates the practice of the profession the candidate belongs to
• Profit: Whatever one does will qualify as a career only if it is able to offer enough resources or enough benefit for a good life.
• Milestones: Achievements over periods of time used to measure the success or failure of a career.
• Focus: All effort and attention must be put in the career to achieve success. • Discipline: Being intentional and doing all that is in the roadmap at the right time without fail
• Roadmap: The roadmap defines what the career will achieve within a lifetime, and what will be achieved over a period of time described as milestone.
• Lifelong: A career must be lifelong set of activities.
  
• Examples of Career
• A football administrator has a career.
• An accountant in the hotel who becomes an accountant in a hospital has a career
• A bank Managing Director who becomes a Governor has a career
• A retired Magistrate who becomes Estate Manager has a career
• Examples of Job
• A footballer has a job not a career unless he becomes an administrator
• An accountant in the hotel who becomes Human Resources Manager in a hospital has a job not a career
• A mechanical engineer who is a waiter in a hotel has a job not a career
• A sociologist who is a teller in the bank has a job not a career
• Benefits of Career Management include but not limited to:
• Career Success
• Recognition
• Profit
• Focus
• Reduction of Career risks
  My next article will be on signs of a sick career and how a career clinic can heal a career. I will also discuss the benefits of using mentors in Career Development and Management.
  

To start your journey, you may need a career mentor or coach. Call 2348033093676.