When making career planning, many people will subconsciously consider only the most optimistic situation: “I want to do X, so I must do A, B, and C to achieve it.” Of course, moderate optimism is not a bad thing.
But to ensure that the plan is robust and feasible, you also need to identify and avoid potential risks that may affect your future vision-the current epidemic illustrates the importance of considering risks in advance. The following has developed a three-step framework that can help everyone avoid risks and protect their careers from a strategic level.
Step 1: Identify your own presets
Bad decisions are often made unintentionally. To identify such implicit decisions, try to write down your basic presuppositions about professional and personal goals. Refer to the following example, do you think of yourself:
● Will stay somewhere forever?
● Will you always work in your current company or your current field?
● Will be promoted next year?
● Can a certain major customer be retained indefinitely?
● No need to receive education or technical training?
● Will always work for a certain boss you like?
If it is difficult to perceive your own presuppositions, first imagine your ideal career, and then move forward, imagine what will go wrong and prevent you from achieving your goals. This method usually helps you find blind spots that are easy to skip.
Step 2: Stress test your plan
Find your own preset and stress test it. Jonathan, who once advised special forces operations, found that similar problems may arise in military missions and personal career development. He summarized them into five Ds: Deceive, Disrupt, Degrade, Deny, Destroy. What are the specific factors that will have these effects on your desired career path?
Referencing these five Ds will prompt you to think about possible problems in your plan from a variety of different perspectives. Think about how each of your presets will be affected by the five Ds, and how to prevent them in advance.
1. Deception: Is the data referenced in your plan likely to be inaccurate? For example, when Jonathan was studying for a degree in product design, the school believed that students had to spend several years learning hand-drawn engineering drawings.
However, when he graduated, engineering drawings were completely digitalized, and he soon switched to offshore outsourcing. Demand is drastically reduced. His career development is not as secure as he expected.
Similar to Jonathan, when Dolly started her first job as a print media reporter, she thought that the media industry in its heyday would continue to provide stable development opportunities. But within a year, she was unemployed.
When formulating a career development plan, she did not expect that online media would take most of the profits of the newspaper industry. If she noticed the signs of change early, she could have made a backup plan in advance so that she would not panic looking for a new job.
Ask yourself: Is there a trend that seems small now but may develop and grow in the near future? Can the presupposition that is the basis of one’s current business adapt to future market trends?
2. Interference: Sometimes you will encounter unexpected new opportunities and decide to change your career track.
But if you plan to stick to the original plan, you must pay attention to identifying distractions that may derail you-it may be a bad thing like a health problem, or it may be a new opportunity for positive personal or professional development (but also a distraction).
For example, Jonathan was very excited about getting a senior leadership position at HP, but he did not consider how this change in his career would affect his goal of writing a book. Later, it turned out that accepting this position was the right choice, but he had time to finish writing after he left HP, and the original plan was postponed by three years.
3. Decrease: Are there any accidents that make the expected result worse? Jonathan originally planned to get most of his income through conference speeches by 2020. This goal seemed very reasonable in 2019, but he was quickly caught off guard by the epidemic.
Fortunately, he formulated preventive measures against the risks of a single source of income, and mastered multiple sources of income such as books and corporate consulting.
4.Decrease: Are there any accidents that make the expected result worse? Jonathan originally planned to get most of his income through conference speeches by 2020. This goal seemed very reasonable in 2019, but he was quickly caught off guard by the epidemic.
Fortunately, he formulated preventive measures against the risks of a single source of income, and mastered multiple sources of income such as books and corporate consulting.
5. Negative: Are there any factors that may prevent you from implementing the plan? It may be geopolitical factors, industry trends, or even personal health issues. For example, Jonathan’s father did not expect that he would suddenly lose the ability to work due to a brain tumor, but he purchased long-term disability insurance a few years ago as a precaution.
Such preventive measures eased the financial pressure caused by his unexpected early retirement.
6. Destruction: Which core assets cannot achieve the goal once they are lost? It can be various forms of assets, such as important contractors or service providers, long-term customers, and even the infrastructure necessary to complete the work.
If a key partner suddenly closes down, or the business focus has shifted and you cannot continue to work with you, how do you respond?
Finding a backup supplier or partner may make you feel troublesome, but if you know that your business will not stop completely due to a failure of one link, you will feel very at ease and the quality of your business can be guaranteed.
One of Dolly’s students encountered this situation. This student hired a part-time assistant who worked remotely as a backup, and then her best assistant was accidentally forced to resign. With the help of that part-time assistant, her business continued to operate.
Tools for daily use also fall into this category. Dolly learned that if you want to repair the laptop, you must send the computer to the repair shop and wait for more than a week. She realized that this seemingly minor issue could bring her business to a standstill.
In order to reduce her dependence on a single device, the next time she replaces a new computer, she will not replace the old one with the new one, but leave the old computer as a backup device. The old computer can only be exchanged for two hundred dollars
at most, and spending this extra money allows her to eliminate a big hidden danger in her work.
Step 3: Defend against weaknesses
Of course, it is impossible to prevent all threats, but as long as the weaknesses in the plan are found, we can try to make plans.
People are prone to mood swings when disasters occur. At this time, the best response plan is your previous plan based on rational analysis.
We have found that to prepare for the worst-case scenario, the following two strategies are particularly useful:
1 Choice: Expand your definition of success
Don’t limit your ideal job to a specific position, consider what characteristics this job attracts you, and think about other jobs that also have these characteristics. For example, you may want to become a corporate CFO, but through analysis, you find that you can also choose to manage finances for non-profit organizations and provide consulting for startups.
Then you can focus on developing the most widely applicable skills, and consider the other two paths when the CFO path is not going well.
Both Dolly and Jonathan’s experience can illustrate the importance of retaining other options in their careers. Dolly, who likes to work abroad, is applying for dual citizenship in Italy, so that she can maintain a close bond with her family and prevent risks caused by geopolitical issues in the United States.
Jonathan learns a new skill every year, reads six related professional books, and finds a tutor to guide him. Over time, he has mastered the basic knowledge in various fields such as food science, software development, and macroeconomics, which has broadened his horizons and gained many career development possibilities.
2 Air gap: limit the impact of occupational problems
“Air gap” is a term in hardware development, meaning to separate two components in a system, even if one of them fails, it will not affect the other. Weaknesses in career development can also be separated in this way.
If you find a potential risk, find a way to isolate the part that may be affected by it and minimize the negative impact.
For example, if your field may be impacted by artificial intelligence, you can start developing a side business from now on. If the main business cannot be sustained, you can still rely on the income and work experience of the side business to survive.
You don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) quit your original position, but exploring and testing ideas from now on can make it easier for you to start a new business.
Don’t put all your energy into one place (such as the current company). If you are laid off without establishing an external network, it may be difficult to find a new job. Similarly, no matter how much your investment is, it is always good to invest in as many areas as possible.
In addition to consulting work and traditional investment, Jonathan also has passive income from the company where he is a partner, and royalties from patents made a few years ago when he was not working.
The same goes for Dolly. In addition to consulting work, she also produces online courses, and invests in startups and drama productions. Professionals, regardless of their seniority, can begin to develop new skills that have nothing to do with their main business, establish a new interpersonal network, and provide a buffer against possible future shocks.
A career is a long-term investment. No one knows what will happen in the future-the stock market crashes, the family gets sick, the lottery wins, everything is possible. However, proactively envisioning various possibilities in the future can allow you to avoid unnecessary risks and plan ahead, so that your efforts today can be rewarded tomorrow.
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