What’s your career plan?
pharmafile | November 19, 2008 | Feature | Business Services |Â Â career, planning, recruitmentÂ
You probably know the type: successful people who apparently ease through their careers, seemingly running on invisible, smooth rails towards advancement and success. Leading a charmed life, they always seem to be in the right place at the right time, in complete control of their destiny, and always doing better than you.
Are they just lucky? Or well-connected? Or perhaps it’s ‘old school tie’. It’s tempting to explain away the fact that others seem to be having a more successful career than you in these terms, because it passes on the responsibility for your less than satisfactory career path onto factors you cannot influence. But the fact is – and you know this really – that to a great extent your destiny is in your own hands. Whilst you can’t totally control your career, you can do lots to ensure that you maximise the chances of success, whatever life throws at you.
It’s strange that while we plan for most of the important things in our life – climbing the property ladder, pensions, family and so on – so many of us rely on what seems like chance to see us through the thing which will pre-occupy most of us for a good 40 years: our career.
It’s true that many careers are often established by chance. I know of one PR man – now running his own successful agency – who fell into that particular career path because he agreed, on a drunken night in a student bar, to be the press agent for a gerbil with political aspirations (it’s a long story). Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and there will always be an element of it in anyone’s career. But trusting entirely to chance is a mistake. The worst thing is to drift from job to job, with no clear idea of what you want to achieve.
The answer is to have a clear career plan, and nowhere is that more important than in the fast-changing world of pharma. It’s surprising how few people in our industry have one – and that is why the favoured few seem to do so well. If you want to join them, you must start planning for success.
The first thing to think about is what success looks like for you. The answer to this question will be different for every individual, so only you can answer this. What factors are important for you: money; status; job satisfaction; power; work/life balance – you will be able to add in others. After all success is a very personal thing. A colleague asked me the other day if I was happy with what I had achieved. I found it really hard to answer the question as I had never thought about it that way.
If you’re feeling particularly negative, you can approach things from the other direction: what makes your career less successful than you want it to be: getting stuck in a rut or a ‘dead-end’ job; constantly being at the mercy of more successful colleagues; no job satisfaction; watching bitterly as peers get better jobs, and so on. Sometimes we have to realise what we don’t want before we can focus on what we do.
Future proof yourself
It’s a common mistake to think that a career plan can give you control over your own destiny. The reality is that no-one is in total control of their destiny; outside influences have a nasty habit of intervening (as many city bankers are finding out to their cost). So to my mind a career plan is more about future-proofing yourself, in other words ensuring you are a good ‘catch’ for a company, should you be – or choose to be – on the ‘outside’ of a corporate downsizing or a merger/takeover.
On the biggest scale, that is about being able to demonstrate that you have added value to the organisations you have worked for. That means planning to gain the relevant experience, whether in terms of brands, therapy areas or functional expertise. You need to have achieved demonstrable success, a good track record of performance.
Of course, planning for your career will ideally commence before you start it, so that you can lay down the ‘foundations’ for that career in terms of qualifications. The extent to which this is necessary varies by market: in eastern Europe a medical or pharmacy degree is vital, whereas in the UK it’s generally about being a graduate ‘plus’.
Even if you didn’t start planning at university stage, there are still several ‘foundations’ you need to lay as your career progresses, which have little to do with qualifications. Once you are a few years into your career, things like intelligence, action orientation, the ability to work within large organisations with matrix management, managing upwards and working the corporate environment all count, as much if not more so than your degree. Your initial qualification might get you onto your career ladder in the first place. It is these more corporate skills which will propel you up it.
And let’s not forget the huge importance of building good networks as you build your career – this should be a central plank of your career plan. If you can’t entirely control your destiny, it is certainly easy enough to lose control of it completely. The people who have done this always seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: working for the wrong companies, or on insignificant brands, or not getting enough experience while working on a brand, perhaps becoming a specialist in only one element of the marketing mix too soon (partly because they haven’t planned to gain the broad range of experience first).
Planning for success
Now a reasonable question at this stage might be: my career is going to be 40 years or so; how can I possibly plan to such a timescale? It’s a fair point. Would someone setting out on their career in pharma in 1968 have been able to foresee the many changes in the industry during the subsequent years? Of course not.
But a career plan is not about mapping every detail of your career. Rather, it’s about knowing what you really want. So your plan should be structured enough to know what you are looking for, and with a view to the different pieces of the career puzzle that you need to accumulate. In my view, that means it’s about planning as far ahead as the next job and the one after that, but with a view to building a broad and attractive CV for the future. I should point out that when I say the next job that might be a different role within the same organisation – I’m not saying you have to up sticks every 18 months to build a career.
The key is knowing what your goals are, and only you can set these – there is no off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all career plan (and beware of careers consultants who tell you there is). Think of your career plan as a map to help you get to where you need to go. There’s no point having a map unless you have decided on a destination. You’ll simply drift around aimlessly, although at least with a map you won’t be lost. You just won’t be moving forward.
Given that you can’t possibly know what the future is going to throw at you, I would steer clear of having one, big goal for your career. Far better to set yourself a series of smaller goals. The vital thing is to review those goals – and your progress towards them – regularly. In the early stages of your career this will need to be very regular (once a year or even more frequently), whereas you might feel more confident that your goals are going to remain more stable later in your career.
Of course, there’s no point having a plan if you don’t then implement it. So your career plan should include some specific actions. It’s likely that these will be varied, but may well include some of the following: gaining more qualifications (does an MBA fit in there somewhere perhaps?); building up your network of contacts both in the industry and outside; gaining a wider range of experience, perhaps through spending some time outside the industry in consultancy.
Turbo-charge your CV
A good career plan will help you turbo-charge your range of experience, provided it is clear, focussed and realistic. Whilst you will never be in total control of your career, because of external factors, market changes and the fact that other human beings will have an influence on it, a career plan can help you take back control over your own destiny, and help you ensure that you end up in the job you have always dreamt of, giving you the satisfaction, money, status or any other measure of success you choose.
It’s never too late to start. It doesn’t matter if you are just entering the industry, or if you’re a grizzled ‘old-timer’ with 25 years under your belt, the message is clear: if you want to run your career, and not let it run you, then you need to take hold of it and plan it. What are you waiting for?
Creating a successful career plan
1. Keep doing it: Career planning is not something you do once at the start of your career. It needs to be done on a regular basis, and this requires some discipline. Set aside some dedicated time to thinking about your career plan on a regular basis – perhaps twice a year. This is best done out of the office, so perhaps it’s a day on the weekend when you can shut out the day-to-day and concentrate on thinking about your future.
2. Monitor your progress: How have you performed against your career plan since you last reviewed it? Part of any strategic planning progress should be evaluating how well you are doing against plan, and the same goes fro your career plan.
3. Think about your personal aspirations: You will be much more successful – and much happier – if your career path mirrors your own personal likes and dislikes. The best way to see if your career is in tune with these is to list them. Write down the things you like doing and the things you hate doing.
Then map your career path alongside these – if it falls mainly into your ‘dislikes’ category, you need to re-evaluate your career plan. Conversely, if it matches your ‘likes’, then your plan is probably on the right track.
4 Keep your CV up to date: Not for the reason you might think. A CV is useful all the time, not just when you are looking for a new job. Keeping the record of your achievements and accomplishments up to date means that when you come to build and/or review your career plan, some half-forgotten success may spur you into thinking about a new career direction, or help you realise where your strengths are.
5. Set clear and SMART goals: If your career plan is your route map to success, then setting clear goals establishes a destination for your career journey. Given that this journey is likely to last 40 years, it’s a good idea to have interim stop-off points, just as you would on a long journey. Your goals need to be realistic, yet stretching. Bear in mind that you will probably end up tweaking (or even drastically changing) these goals as your career progresses, and as you develop as a person.
6. Grab every development opportunity: Even if training you are offered doesn’t seem relevant now, always grab the opportunity – you just don’t know what skills and what knowledge will be important in the future. And you also need to be proactive in finding new training and development opportunities, and taking advantage of them, even if you have to do so off your own back. Remember that development opportunities can mean much more than traditional, structured training.
7. Believe in yourself: You couldn’t market a product that you didn’t believe in, and essentially your career plan is a marketing plan for yourself. If you have done it correctly, your plan will reflect your strengths and those things which motivate you – and that puts you in a good position to be able to see it through.
8. Be really good at what you do: After all, the cream always rises to the top!
How well planned is your career?
What will you be doing just before you retire?
How did you get into your current role?
How is your career progressing compared to the cohort you entered the industry with?
Do you enjoy your job?
Your answers:
Mostly (a): You are perhaps confusing status with career success. There are many more measures – you need to be planning for a more fulfilling career (although there is nothing wrong with ambition).
Mostly (b): You seem to have your career well-planned – congratulations. Are you reviewing your plan on a regular basis, and updating it as your circumstances change?
Mostly (c): You are drifting into terminal career unhappiness – you need a plan.
Dr Paul Stuart-Kregor is director of The MSI Consultancy. He can be contacted at pstuartkregor@msi.co.uk; alternatively, visit The MSI Consultancy website at www.msi.co.uk.
Related Content
Government to set up express freight service for medicines in case of no-deal Brexit
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) plans to spend £3 million on emergency …
FDA recruitment official says Trump’s policies are making hiring difficult
Melanie Keller, Acting Associate Commissioner for Scientific and Clinical Recruitment at the US Food and …
Making careers in medcomms more visible – Synergy Vision launches new recruitment website
“I’d never heard of med comms until I wanted to change career and started exploring …
