subject: Be Prepared For Unexpected Changes In Your Business Career [print this page] Many people like to imagine that their lives will follow a predictable route, much as they might drive a vehicle from one city to another along familiar, high-speed roads to visit an old friend. Most of the time, the imagined life route is anticipated to be fast, safe, successful, and uneventful.
By contrast, a route through life often turns out to be slow, unsafe, and very eventful in ways that people would prefer to avoid. Few would ever imagine how much circumstances turn out differently than expected.
For instance, I well remember a talented, dedicated financial executive who unexpectedly lost his wife to cancer at a young age. As a result, he had to refocus his life for many years on raising three young children alone.
I also remember a heartbroken CEO whose company sold alcohol and who lost his teenaged son in an automobile accident that involved underage drinking: The CEO looked more like a corpse at the funeral than his dead son did.
Lives aren't affected just by what happens to those in your family: They are also affected by what happens to you.
When I was a young consultant, I worked with a group of hard-charging young MBAs who decided that they should get into shape and began daily running. I didn't happen to join them, being more averse to exercise than they were. Within five years, each of these runners dropped dead of an unexpected heart attack either while or just after running. Potentially great careers were cut way too short.
As troubling as such deaths are, disability can be an even greater problem. A good friend of mine was on the way to give a luncheon speech when his taxi was involved in a minor accident. He went on to give the speech, but collapsed just a few hours later. He suffered permanent damage from untreated bleeding on the brain that left him severely disabled for the rest of his life. He should have headed for the hospital rather than the luncheon.
Business environments change as well. Some of the most sought-after people in information technology were once those who could write simple programs in COBOL, one of the earliest programming languages. Since then, millions of programs have been written in COBOL. More recently, programs are being written in more sophisticated and more effective languages.
Most of those old COBOL programs are still running somewhere, and people who can update and fix them have spent the last several decades working on some of the least interesting work imaginable while still being in the fast-evolving information technology industry.
That's a pretty daunting list of potential hurdles, delays, and roadblocks for anyone's career. Clearly, the unexpected could not have been avoided in many cases. What are the lessons for planning your career?
The Boy Scouts have a motto that would seem to apply: Be Prepared. In the context of a business career, that means being able to handle whatever life or a career might throw at you in a timely manner.
Here are some of the things that it's a good idea to prepare for:
1. Deciding that you don't like the career you are working in.
2. Finding that you don't have the knowledge or skill you need for the career progress you seek.
3. Encountering more difficult economic or industry conditions than you expect.
4. Having a health set-back personally or in your family.
5. Finding that you are overcommitted to your career at the expense of serving your family's needs.
6. Developing a new interest you want to engage in professionally.
The Boy Scouts favor having each youngster master in advance important skills for meeting challenges that can come up. When an unexpected circumstance arrives later in life, the scout can draw on that earlier learning and experience to take the right direction and make the right actions.
In a business career, there are many things to prepare for that could happen. If you didn't start a business career until you were fully prepared, you might be middle-aged when you began.
What's the alternative? You can master how to learn quickly and to effectively apply what you learn to your situation.
That learning approach is the essence of a teaching method named after Oxford University: the Oxford Tutorial Method. A learner works one-on-one with someone quite knowledgeable to read cutting edge works about a subject and then to write a paper to apply what has been learned. For a business student, this method requires solving a business problem or making an improvement.
Let's consider the career of Mr. Peter Schulz, an MBA graduate of Rushmore University, to see how all this advice might be applied to your situation. As a youngster, Mr. Schulz found school to be boring compared to what he could be doing out on the street in his native Netherlands. He did as little work as possible, which meant that it took two more years to finish than for most.
Searching for a career, he was attracted to becoming a police officer because police education took only one year. After graduating, he shouted aloud for joy that he would never have to return to school again. However, two years of police work convinced Mr. Schulz that this wasn't the right line of work for the rest of his life. He bit his tongue and started attending school in the evenings.
Four years later, he started engineering studies in information technology. During these studies, he was hired as a software engineer and did well. Eventually, he earned a bachelor's degree in IT engineering.
A few years later, Mr. Schulz decided to strike out on his own as an engineer. Enjoying that work, in another four years he founded a company with a friend that grew to employ 54 software developers within just four more years. At that point, he sold the business.
After taking a few months off, he immediately founded two new companies, one in providing Internet services and the other in applying Oracle technology.
Within two years, Mr. Schulz was again looking for new challenges and decided to earn an MBA degree as background for a planned new career as a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) trainer while he continued to operate the two new businesses and take one international.
Since he was working in two countries simultaneously, Mr. Schulz needed a flexible program that would fit with his travel and work schedules. Then, the unexpected struck again as he lost enough of his hearing that he no longer felt comfortable trying to become a corporate trainer, even with the benefit of the latest hearing aids.
Since he still had the two IT companies, it made sense to add even more knowledge in technology management and he refocused his MBA studies accordingly. Employing the Oxford Tutorial Method, he applied everything he learned to one or the other of his two businesses. In addition, writing so much in English gave him a chance to build and polish his writing skills in that language, a long-held goal.
With a mind that never stops racing, Mr. Schulz also conceived of a new business, state-of-the-art fitness centers, that he launched while earning an MBA. When his career plans changed two years after graduating, he sold the business.
Mr. Schulz had packed a lot of learning, working, and accomplishment into a few short years, always working at least six days a week and traveling a great deal. He began to realize that the strain was getting to him and his health wasn't what it should be. He also felt that he was missing the essence of life.
Drawing on the financial resources remaining from successfully selling two businesses, he decided to act on another lifelong goal . . . to take a leisurely trip around the world with his family. In 2007, the Schulz family headed out and had the time of their lives. Mr. Schulz reports that he now looks five years -- and feels fifteen years -- younger.
To keep his mind occupied while traveling, he devoted ten to twelve hours a week to taking more courses and solving software problems. In addition, he acted on another lifelong dream and wrote a book about the philosophy, whys, and hows of the trip, which was recently published as Nu Even Niet.
What's next? Mr. Schulz reports that he feels like a 21-year-old again, at the brink of starting his career all over. This time, he wants to be a teacher. Despite his hearing challenges he now feels confident that he can make a great contribution through the combination of his education and extensive experience. In no time at all, he gained a part-time position sharing his extensive knowledge of IT and was looking for another place to teach.
As you can see, he faced all of the six unexpected events that I listed earlier in the article. In each case, he was able to use education and new learning to overcome the unexpected and to launch himself and his family into a more favorable position. You can too.
by: Donald Mitchell
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
