Brian Walch and colleagues explain why mid-career professionals should treat personal development like a project plan. Once you hit senior roles, career paths get murky and you lose external guidance. Creating goals, milestones, and metrics gives you clarity and accountability where the organization won't.
As people move into a mid management career or even reach a middle point
in their career, they often find that
the path forward becomes a lot more murky.
Up until that point, the steps that
they needed to take to continue advancing
were fairly well defined and there was
a lot of support as they progressed through those steps.
But as they get further along in their career, it becomes a lot more ambiguous. The steps forward aren't as clear and
frankly, there's not a ton of support at that point.
I describe this as moving from professional
development to personal development.
In professional development, you often have people that can tell you what things to do and what the results are likely
to be if you do those things.
The forces and the things directing you
are often externally based. But in personal development, the inspiration and the motivation comes from inside and you
are working on goals and aspirations that
are personally driven but are a little
more ambiguous or a little more murky and don't often have clear results as
to what you're going to accomplish. If you put in the effort. It's an exciting place to be, but it can also be a little bit disorienting.
So one of the things I do
with people when we first start working
together is apply project thinking to the
idea of personal development.
And we do that by creating a
project plan for personal development.
A project plan can help provide clarity and direction for those murky and personal
goals and aspirations that people have.
It can provide ways to measure progress and accountability. So I find a lot of value in applying project thinking and creating a project plan, and I think you will too.
One of the things we're going to do over the next several videos is just go through what are the elements
that I include in our project plan.
If you have used some sort of
project thinking in your personal development initiatives,
I'd love to hear about it and
know how it worked for you.
Feel free to send me a message
and I'll be happy to respond. We'll see you on the next video really soon. Thanks.
Episode 116: Guest Brian Walch - The 3 Stages of Career Growth: What Engineers Need and Managers ...
