What actually is a career?

The original meaning of career was 'to move headlong at high speed' as in, the cart careered down the road. Some days I'm sure your career still feels like that.

My favourite definition of career is by Michael Arthur and his colleagues:

"The unfolding sequence of a person's work experiences over time"

Lets break this down a bit.

First, unfolding, which describes the fluid nature of how careers are created. There is less orderly planning than we think as we respond to events and opportunities that come our way. Earlier definitions of career used 'evolving' but contemporary writers realised that this suggested a structured, logical flow which didn't represent the reality of a modern environment.

Second, work experiences. The term career emerged from the Chicago Shool of Sociology in the 1930s and had a broad meaning, for example, the career of deliquents. Today, career has a vocational flavour to do with work related activities, regardless of whether they are paid or not.

Third, over time. Our career is not static. It unfolds over time as we move through different stages. Often, our career appears fragmented looking forward, yet distinct patterns are noticable when we look back over our experiences.

Everyone has one career. We may have many jobs with multiple employers, go through different stages, and travel across geographic and occupational boundaries. But all these experiences coalesce into one career. Enjoy it!

Reference
Arthur, M.B., Hall, D.T., & Lawrence, B.S. (1989). Handbook of Career Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Work experiences you need

Developing and growing your career requires experience. It is through our successes and failures that we learn the most.

We tend to think about work experience as one-dimensional, in other words, that it is about experience in general. There are, however, different experience sets that we need to go through in order to develop our career. This depends first and foremost on our preferred career direction. The aim is to gather experiences that lead us toward our future direction.

Lets take an example. Ellen Goldman interviewed 36 CEO's to identify different types of work experiences that were important to develop the ability to think strategically. She identified 9 types, including for example:

• General work experience: a wide ranging variety of experiences that are significant in scope and are autonomous.
  
• Being mentored: particularly early on in one‘s career with have frequent contact and immediate feedback on performance.
  
• Being challenged one-on-one by a key colleague about one‘s thinking.
  
• Dealing with the threat of organisational survival by an external entity: for example a takeover threat or the loss of a key customer.

Think outside the box when it comes to what sets of experiences you may need.
Then, write down one action you will take to get one of these experiences in the next 14 days. Experiences won't happen unless you start somewhere!

Further reading: Goldman, Ellen F. (2008). The power of work experience: Characteristics critical to developing expertise in strategic thinking. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 19 (3): 217-239.