Managing Career Transitions

This book addresses the unique needs of recareering adults, providing them with a six-step model for the process of career transition. It addresses career planning issues relevant to today's rapidly changing and highly competitive market. Provides readers with the "big picture" regarding basic economic principles, the global economy, and shifting market realities. Offers reader guidance on using the Web for career exploration. Information on preparing scannable resumes. Offers readers advice for those who may wish to research their own business opportunities. An invaluable reference book for readers using this program.

"Whether you're going for that promotion, looking to jump ship, or change careers entirely, Michael Watkins' Your Next Move is a book you'll want to read." So starts the positive review of Your Next Move on the influential 800 CEO Read website. It's true that all leaders--no matter how seasoned--need guidance through the professional changes that define a career. In fact, transitions into new roles are the crucibles in which leaders get their toughest tests, and they're the defining factor in professional careers today. Yet far too often, leaders fail to transition effectively into new roles. The resulting costs are high, for individual careers and for organizations. In Your Next Move, leadership-transition guru Watkins shows how you can survive and thrive in all the major transitions you will face during your career-including promotions, leading former peers, on-boarding into a new organization, making an international move, or turning around or realigning an organization. With real-life examples and case studies, Watkins illustrates the defining hurdles associated with each type of transition. He then provides the insights, strategies, and tools you'll need to accelerate through these crucial turning points and continue moving up in your career. The necessary complement to the author's bestselling guide The First 90 Days, which has been translated in more than 20 languages worldwide, Your Next Move offers the keen observations, tried-and-true management wisdom, and practical good sense Watkins is renowned for. It's a vital resource for any manager or executive seeking to maintain career momentum. To quote the reviewer from above: "It's not just about "moving" but about what happens when those actions are taken. Success or failure are the two options, and which option you emerge with will determine what happens going forward. Watkins' book definitely has the research and insight to equip you for the better of the two paths."

Don’t be a minor character in life’s story...be your own hero! Our world is changing at a faster pace than ever before. New technologies, global communications, diverse populations and shifting expectations drive the changes that impact our daily lives. This rapid rate of change leaves many of us feeling uncertain, overwhelmed and confused. Many have choices; yet we lack a systematic and conscious approach to make the important kinds of quality of life decisions we face in this changing world. Often bouncing from one turning point to another without any sense of control; when we finally stop for a moment and think about life, we long for meaning. Turning Points offers a systematic approach to understand our life themes, take control of the next chapter, and be the hero of our story. Turning Points will help you identify your qualities, interests, experiences, successes, dreams and values so you can better understand and anticipate change. Taking the time to review these aspects of your self helps bring the important things to consciousness. This in turn can lead you to a life plan that will satisfy you and give your life meaning and purpose. Personal discovery will empower you to navigate your life transitions. You will develop a mission and context for the many decisions you make as you navigate your turning points. Be the hero of your own life story. Take control of your Turning Points.

How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into RealityWhether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities.Through engrossing stories—from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist—Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can: Explore possible selves Craft and execute "identity experiments" Create "small wins" that keep momentum going Survive the rocky period between career identities Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition Make time for reflection—without missing out on windows of opportunity Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us.

Professionals face many critical crossroads in their careers, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes more expected, but for which they were often not truly prepared. This book discusses many such career transitions - from leaving a corporation to joining a non-profit, evolving from athlete to executive, or returning to a former employer. Using the stories of 50 leaders from all over the world, the authors describe what provokes the change, the challenges it creates, how the individual is surviving the transition, and what effective leaders do to navigate and grow from it. Disrupt Your Career offers a simple, easy-to-use framework to help make the most of any uncharted transition. Drawing on examples of a wide range of companies, it also provides recommendations to help organizations better acquire, develop and retain talent.

Clocking Out gives readers a new way to think about their careers and delivers practical advice to first assess and consolidate individual power then make thoughtful, meaningful changes and choices for a successful transition. Ten fascinating stories bring to life the key components of effective career transition - choice, mindset, agility, and trust - and highlight how each interplay during a career change.

Based on the thesis that individuals develop not in isolation, but in a direction consistent with both personal needs and the needs of the surrounding environment, this volume concentrates on the development of adults in their careers within organizations. The organizational and individual perspectives offered provide practical guidance and examples for human resource development specialists to use in the evaluation of their current career development programs and the design of new ones. Key issues receiving prime attention include the necessity of reward systems to the success of any career development program, career transitions, and five critical career development research areas.