Tweet: Every career offers Thrillers, Fillers, & Killers in how it translates in a rsum. Learn the alchemy of getting the gold in any situation!
In metallurgy and in metal refining dross is the mass of solid impurities floating on hot, pure, molten metal or something that is dispersed in the metal. It is formed by oxidation of the molten metal and is entirely a waste product. Although dross is usually associated with base metals, such a lead, tin, and zinc, gold refining creates it, too! It floats on the top of molten gold and must be removed to purify and to make the gold more valuable in its application.
How does this dross metaphor enter as you manage your career? Simple. Every career has a certain arc to it and the purpose of any professional is to identify a career that engages them and to rise in it to get to the top. By this I do not mean getting to a point of making the most money or achieving the highest status in your profession, but engaging yourself in a way that rewards your work, makes you grow, and draws you respect of your peers and others within your own professional ecosystem.
Managing ones rsum is at the heart of how they manage their career. A rsum has two aspects to it: its content on the one hand (gold) and how it is packaged to show it in the best light of how a career is managed (what have you done with that gold). Many surrender their rsum management process to the jobs they engage in and do not pay much attention to how they can change the way a rsum shapes up by doing these jobs differently. As a result, they are often at a disadvantage in how they are able to leverage their past momentum to land exciting gigs, put their career on a steeper arc, and to achieve more within the same time compared to those who are not as inspired or diligent about managing their rsums.
So, what does one have to do to maximize the gold in their career and to keep the dross to a minimum? Here is my suggestion:
1.Accept that only you are responsible for managing your rsum, and not your boss or your company. I cannot even count how many of my clients come to me complaining or lamenting how they were misled by their boss, company, or others in power that caused them to choose options that did not help their career.
2.Clearly understand how to spot rsum Thrillers, Fillers, and Killers throughout your career. A Thriller in your rsum is an entry from a stint that exploits your innate gifts (your genius) and allows you to claim coveted accomplishments that can be a differentiator for you in a competitive market. A Filler entry or bullet typically reflects that in the absence of anything exciting you were cruising along and doing the everyday stuff in your job (half awake) and staying out of trouble. As the adjective suggests such entries merely act as space takers in your otherwise compelling narrative. A Killer entry, on the other hand, sets you back in being seen as a positively impactful leader (Initiated a new concept for the next-gen product that quickly led to loss of market dominance and companys eventual acquisition by a major competitor.)
3.In my dealings with clients when they are putting their leadership narrative together in their rsum they often shortchange their accomplishments by disparaging their work in how they perceive it. For example, if they came up with a great product idea and they led the efforts to get the product to launch by doing all the right things their responsibility as a Product Development Manager mostly ends at product launch. How the product performed in the market after its launch is often the result of the contributions of Product Managers, Marketing, and other support functions, not wholly my clients. Yet, many struggle with claiming this as a worthy accomplishment in their rsum. So, to weed out the dross from the gold in this example, focusing on your own accomplishment, and not your companys, can serve you better.
4.Do not assume that all Killer assignments will end up as they started. Often, projects get into trouble for a variety of reasons: incompetent players, politics, lack of resources, changing requirement, among others. If you can spot a loser opportunity, take it on after doing some due diligence on it, and then turn it around and deliver what was otherwise a lost cause (dross), you can transform the same assignment into a Thriller bullet for your rsum. In some cases of my clients when they came to me for help when their career was languishingeven tanking, identifying such opportunities helped them turn around their situation.
5. Many Filler assignments can also be transformed into veritable gold by looking at them differently. For example, one of my clients was Manager of Engineering Services, where he was responsible for providing the infrastructure to enable product design (provide platforms, tools, and ongoing services to help developers do their jobs). In his otherwise mundane and stultifying job we decided to look at the system development life cycle (SDLC) in his company and concluded that by making incremental and transformational changes to the infrastructure the design cycle time and the outgoing design quality could be dramatically improved in about 12-18 months. By proposing this and by making a business case for this to implement my client was able to achieve most of what he promised in delivering the next-gen infrastructure and services that changed how new products were developed in that company. Soon after that success he was able to land as a director of engineering services at a larger company.
Any job or career can be perceived as replete with too much dross and too little gold. As examples in this blog suggest the perspective lies in how you view what you see and how you mine it to bring home pure gold and make your career shine.
Good luck!
| About Author | |
|
Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
Website: http://dilipsaraf.com/?p=2659
Disclaimer: Please use this channel at your own discretion. These articles are contributed by our users. We are not responsible or liable for any problems related to the utilization of information of these articles.
