The Mid-Career Success Guide: Planning for the Second Half of Your Working Life

217 Pages·2006·1.34 MB·english

by  Sally J. Power

THE
MID-CAREER
SUCCESS
GUIDE

THE
MID-CAREER
SUCCESS
GUIDE
Planning for
the Second Half
of Your
Working Life
Sally J. Power
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Power, Sally J., 1947–
The mid-career success guide : planning for the second half of
your working life / Sally J. Power.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-98801-5 (alk. paper)
1. Career changes—United States—Management. 2. White collar workers—
United States. 3. Mid-career—United States. I. Title.
HF5384.P69 2006
650.1084'40973—dc22 2006022461
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2006 by Sally J. Power
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006022461
ISBN: 0-275-98801-5
First published in 2006
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Key Terms xi
1 Introduction: How the Career Landscape Has Changed 1
2 Four New Strategies for Career Management:
The “Employability Plus” Model 13
3 Success Strategy #1: Articulating a Personalized
Work Focus 29
4 Success Strategy #2: Learning about the Near Future
of Your Work in the Multiple-Employer Environment 53
5 Success Strategy #3: Taking Action to Shape Your Career 83
6 Success Strategy #4: Managing Your Career Cycle 117
7 Epilogue: Changing the Deal 145
vi Contents
Appendix: Career Management Resources by Janice Kragness 153
Suggested Reading 175
Notes 181
Index 195
Preface
This book arises out of my own decision to redirect my career. I had
spent the majority of my earning life focused on teaching and helping to
build a successful, part-time MBA program at my university. I had
always thought I wanted to eventually be an administrator, but a two-
year administrative assignment showed me that, although I was a suc-
cessful manager, I did not get the emotional payoffs from it that I had
expected. I wanted to find something I really enjoyed doing, and I
wanted more employment options during the last twenty-plus years of
my career.
After much thought and reflection I decided I wanted to build on my
current experience but become a content expert in some specialty. The
next task was to decide where to focus, so I began to read broadly using
interest as my guide. What my reading eventually began to center
around were the major shifts occurring in employment dynamics and
their effects on individuals. These changes were already having wide-
ranging, negative impacts on many people. Real incomes (i.e., after
adjusting the figures for inflation) had been stagnant or declining for the
majority of Americans beginning in the 1970s, and the numbers of indi-
viduals affected by this trend was growing significantly. Fewer and fewer
workers were getting benefit packages. Downsizing was becoming a rou-
tine management tactic. And increasing numbers of workers—not just
unskilled and blue-collar workers but white-collar professionals and
managers as well—were having trouble getting new jobs comparable to
the ones they had lost.
viii Preface
Through my study of management, I could see why these changes were
occurring, but I was very concerned about their long-term ramifications
for our society. For this reason I began to think about what would need to
happen to reverse some of these trends. The result of that focus and of
much reading and thinking, talking and experimenting is this book.
The book is focused on white-collar workers who are in mid-career.
Defining “mid” anything is quite difficult.1 What we consider middle age
is changing as the average lifetime extends. Middle class has been
defined on the basis of many things—for example, income or home
ownership.2 And mid-career has similar difficulties.3 Here is how I
define mid-career: It is the period in an earning career that begins after
an individual has moved through those first years of orientation into the
full-time, adult workforce—after the individual’s first round of experi-
mentation with different types of jobs and employers. The period starts
when the person has settled into a type of work in which that person
believes she will be happy for the foreseeable future. For those who have
studied Super’s theory of career stages,4 it is after his “establishment”
stage. For me, mid-career lasts until the individual has either made the
psychological decision to “coast” into retirement or leaves the earning
workforce.
I decided to focus this book on white-collar earners. It is true that
those with fewer skills and less formal education are also suffering as a
result of the changes in our economic system, but there are many people
already focused on their situation. Many people believe that white-collar
workers can take care of themselves. After all, they are some of the most
educated individuals in our society, and they tend to have more
resources than most. Yet, I think that national statistics, articles in the
popular press, and many of the academic studies that have been done
show that many in this group are struggling. Furthermore, the number of
white-collar workers negatively affected seems to be growing with each
economic recession. As you will read, I do not think that the way to deal
most successfully with the impacts of the changes in employment
dynamics is obvious to most.
The second reason for focusing on white-collar workers is that my
proposed model for proactive response to the changes in the earning
world is still fairly abstract, and it relies on the ability of individuals to
move into new activities or to give old activities a new twist. I think that
white-collar workers as a group are the most able to understand the
model in its present form and use it to their benefit. If this approach
helps a significant group of these individuals, then I expect that a num-
ber of individuals and organizations will move to provide a more formal-
ized infrastructure that will make the needed information and this model
more accessible to more individuals.
Preface ix
This is a book focused on a new kind of career and on a new kind of
career management. While this model can accommodate those inter-
ested in learning what is needed to “move up” at their current employer
or one very similar—that is, the traditional organizational career
model—it is more focused on how individuals can manage their careers
to build them in many different directions, not just up. And while I do
include some thoughts on preparing to own your own business because
there are so many individuals who say that that is what they want to do
in the second half of their earning careers, this book is not focused pri-
marily on how to become an independent professional or free agent.
This book is primarily aimed at employees in the middle and upper-
middle levels of medium and large organizations. It is likely these
employees will need to seek employment with new employers repeatedly
in the future. Furthermore, greater competition for jobs and the acceler-
ated pace of change in the earning world means that the way people
should manage their careers for these transitions needs to change as well.
I have received a lot of help in writing this book, not only from people
who have known that they were being helpful, but also from many who
have not. I have read and pondered many more books and articles on
this subject than appear in the endnotes and the Suggested Reading
essay, even though I have tried to wedge direct references to many of the
most important books and articles into them. Without the work of all of
these scholars, I could not have written this book. Also, from 1986 to
2004 I taught an MBA course that had as its major assignment the writ-
ing of a personal growth statement. The statement’s purpose was for each
student to describe what he or she wanted to accomplish in his or her
career and life and draft a plan for moving forward toward those goals.
The students in this course were virtually all working adults, and a signif-
icant number of them could be classified as being in mid-career. Teach-
ing that course gave me the chance to watch over 1,000 individuals
grapple with many of the same types of career challenges that are the
focus of this book.
I am sure that many of my ideas came as a result of reading and think-
ing about the creative solutions some of these students developed,
although I may not be able to say exactly who showed me what. I have
worked with a number of other working adults in recent years, and they
have taught me a lot as well. The vast majority of stories that I tell in this
book to illustrate various points come from these experiences, although
the names have been changed, and any identifying details have been dis-
guised to maintain confidentiality.
I want to thank some people in particular. Mark Savickas wrote a let-
ter urging me to work on a book early in my transition to becoming an
expert on mid-career development. That letter is still under the glass on