In this world, "the only unstoppable thing is time, which, like a sharp knife, silently cuts through all hardness and keeps moving forward." Nothing can make its progress bumpy at all, but it has changed everything. "
I have always believed in one sentence: if you mix it up, you will have to pay it back sooner or later.
Although you and I are mortal, just an ordinary member of this crowd, I still hope that everyone's life can blossom and bear fruit in the sun. Whether you can understand the meaning of this passage from your current experience, please write it down first.
I believe that one day, you will understand.
Because time can explain everything, time can prove everything and time can solve everything.
In the process of career planning consultation for nearly a year, I obviously felt the urgency of the demand for career planning for people over 35 years old. It is from these cases that we can clearly understand that the grasp of time plays a decisive role in a person's growth.
Among our customers, we often encounter two extreme situations: one is someone who has achieved a certain level-at least above the director level, with a certain position in the company, with an annual salary of not less than 200,000; The other is that they have worked for many years, but they are still in a relatively low position. No matter the position, material reward or personal value, it is not highly recognized. Although these two situations are extreme, they provide us with thinking that can be used for reference. Through comparison, we find that all people who have achieved certain success in their career development have a common feature, that is, they have been intensively cultivating their fields that they are familiar with and good at for at least 10 years. Those who can't find their place in the workplace often change their direction every year or two and never accumulate in a certain direction. Of course, in addition to frequent job-hopping, there is another factor, that is, there is accumulation in one direction, but this accumulation is repeated and has not risen, leading to stagnation in career development.
Whether you admit it or not, you must pay attention to the "35-year-old phenomenon". Many enterprises clearly stipulate that they are under 35 when recruiting talents. If you are 35 years old, but you still keep changing jobs through the recruitment website, then you should reflect on what you did wrong. Of course, according to our actual consulting experience, if you really don't think about this problem until you are 35 or even older, it is very likely that you will be unable to solve this problem, and many practical difficulties will make you helpless and helpless. By this time, many people will regret their original choice, but want to cry. Therefore, whether to avoid taking more detours or to achieve greater success, you must think about your future livelihood in advance. Too many cases have proved that it is much more useful to plan ahead than to cram for the Buddha's feet temporarily.
Among our customers, quite a few belong to the post-80s generation, which is also a high incidence area of career planning problems. The oldest post-80 s group has passed the age of "standing at 30"; However, there are still quite a few post-80s people who are moving towards their thirties. If youth is the capital that God gives you to make mistakes, you still have time to make up for it. But if you have reached the tail of twenty years old, this kind of capital is no longer your patent. It is a long time from your graduation from college to your thirties, which gives you enough opportunities to understand society, adapt to society and reflect on your growth.
There are five years from the age of 30 to 35. If you are given enough time to make mistakes, then, in order to prevent your career from becoming a mess after the age of 35, you should at least set a clear goal at the age of 30 and spend five years catching up. This may be your last good time growing up. If you miss this opportunity, you will no longer be young, and society will no longer forgive you for being young and frivolous with an inclusive attitude. Otherwise, if you take one more wrong step, you will have to make up for it at ten times the price in the future. From the age of 30 to 35, you should learn to accumulate more thickness for your life, so that you won't spend the rest of your life in regret and regret.
30 years old: Three major problems you have to face.
The first question is about family and responsibility.
Don't think you are still young. Don't think that some problems are far away from you. No matter whether you are decadent or busy, time is passing quickly, and you feel that you are getting older at an accelerated pace. There are some problems, whether you want to face them or not, but your growth stage determines that you must bear the responsibility that matches your age. Most people, at this age, must consider family problems. If you have a family, you must be soberly aware: how should your career develop to ensure that you can support the burden of the whole family? This includes not only your lover, but also your children and parents (especially when both are only children, you have to bear the support of four old people on both sides). At this stage, your pressure will multiply, but if you can't double your growth in the workplace, or even regress in some form, then your future career development will face even greater pressure. And this kind of pressure, more often, will make you have no spare capacity to seek better development. When many people change jobs, they often have a big concern: if I jump, if my income is not as high as it is now, will I easily change jobs in my current job? To put it more bluntly: do I dare to move again easily? Do I still have courage and courage? So if you want to act, you must go into battle lightly without family burden. This is your only choice. Never enjoy comfort at this time, otherwise, you will spend the rest of your life in mediocrity forever.
The second question is the matching degree between ability and age.
Why do many enterprises clearly require five years' experience, 10 years' experience and so on when recruiting talents? Because working hours mean the level of ability that matches it. The same job, five years of experience and 10 years of experience, abilities and responsibilities are different. The longer the working hours, the stronger the ability, and there is a positive multiplication relationship between them. But if you violate this relationship, then you won't be recognized by the employer, and then you will lose better career development opportunities. In many of our customers, a difficult situation is the mismatch between ability and age. Many people who have worked for three to five years, even those who have worked for one year, have little difference in ability, so when they want to make a breakthrough in their careers, they will encounter a lot of resistance. There are two reasons: first, frequent job hopping, no accumulation in one direction, no skills; Second, although it has accumulated in one direction for a long time, it has only increased in the first year, and the remaining years are doing repetitive work and marking time.
So, for those 30-year-old friends, from now on, you must carefully examine one question: how many years have I graduated from work? Do my abilities match my age? If not, then you must establish a sense of crisis as soon as possible, run forward, make up the gap with those prophets, and ensure that you will not be pushed down by others in the competition.
The third problem is the construction and promotion of knowledge structure.
We once served a customer, made sales for five or six years, and accumulated quite rich practical experience. I once jumped ship to apply for the regional marketing manager of a well-known fast-moving enterprise. During the interview, he was able to answer all questions about the specific operational level, but when he rose to the institutional level and strategic level, his mind was blank. I believe that people who have worked in the workplace for five or six years have this feeling: I feel that I can master the specific operational level, whether it is the process or the skill method; But if you look at the problem from a higher level, you often don't know how to start.
In the workplace, people at different job levels do different things, and their horizons and thinking patterns are different. A basic salesman thinks about how to maintain the terminal, which is a tactical matter and his duty; But if a marketing director thinks about how to deal with the terminal boss every day like a salesman, it is his dereliction of duty. The management of every enterprise is composed of strategy and tactics. The grand strategy is subdivided into small strategies, and the small strategies are subdivided into execution tactics, which are put into practice by grassroots personnel. People at different levels are responsible for different heights of work and perform their duties, which is also the significance of teamwork. Similarly, people at different levels have different knowledge structures. The higher the level, the higher your vision and thinking, and the higher your overall knowledge structure level. Otherwise, your ability will always stay at the specific grass-roots operation level, and there will be no great development, let alone the rise of your position.
In addition, from the perspective of communication, the higher the position, the closer the relationship with the boss, and the more opportunities for contact with the company's top management. If you can't keep a high degree of consistency with your boss, then your ability can't be recognized. Under such circumstances, your chances of promotion are slim, and your career is over.
Before the age of 30: how to lay a good foundation
30 years old is an age that connects the past and the future, and it is also a very important time point. Before consulting career planning, we will have an evaluation link to systematically evaluate the comprehensive foundation of customers to see if it is still suitable for career planning. One of the most important criteria is age, and the focus is about 30 years old. If you don't have any accumulation before the age of 30, it is difficult to make a breakthrough in your career after the age of 30, and there are many practical problems that cannot be solved. This is a serious injury. But whenever we meet such a badly injured customer, we can only say to them, "Sorry, there is nothing we can do." Therefore, if you want to make your career after the age of 30 not regret and get through the 30-year-old hurdle smoothly, you need to be responsible for yourself before the age of 30 and plan ahead.
The first thing you should do is to find a goal for which you can strive for 5 years, 10 years or even longer.
This is an ideal state. Because a clear goal can make your career grow around a point and accumulate experience, and this accumulated experience is also your bargaining chip for promotion and salary increase in the future. Although there is no necessary connection between experience and ability, it is basically impossible to improve your ability without the accumulation of experience.
On the question of objectives and core competitiveness-the so-called core competitiveness must have a core. Around this core, you can build your own competitiveness. And this core is your career goal direction-what kind of person do I want to be? This problem has been solved and the direction is clear. Even if you walk slowly, you can walk faster than those who take detours, because you know your goal, you have been moving towards your goal, and you are walking in a straight line. What is the shortcut? The shortcut is not to take a detour, but to go straight ahead.
We consulted a customer last year and changed six companies in seven years. According to the usual understanding, people often think that this person's career development is very bad. Actually, it is not. This person's current monthly salary after tax is 6,543,800 yuan, which is a good level. You may wonder: Why does a person who frequently changes jobs have such a high level of career development? Some people will think he is lucky, just luckier than others. Actually, it is not. Observing his growth experience, we find that there is only one reason, that is, every time he changes jobs, he never deviates from the established direction. As long as the direction is good, then every step of his action is approaching in this direction, accumulating more chips for future career development. The thickness you accumulate will ultimately determine your future development height. Now that house prices and prices are so high, the survival pressure of many people suddenly increases, which also causes many people to become impetuous and go with the flow under the pressure of survival. A job often doesn't last for a few months. If you feel that you can't see hope and your salary can't be raised, you will often choose to resign. But in fact, job-hopping can't fundamentally solve the problem. Nowadays, employers have become very pragmatic, and it is only natural to take as much as you do (of course, the privileged class is out of the discussion). If you can't contribute more value to the development of the company, but you still want to get more returns, no one wants to do such a business that only earns no compensation. How much value you contribute to the company depends on how strong your ability is. The accumulation of ability comes from sticking to one direction for a long time. Even those successful people who look enviable should practice and grow with time. Those who want to make up for the loss in a very short time because they took a detour will only make you lose more things.
You may have heard the law of 10000 hours: No matter you want to succeed in any field, you must pay at least 10000 hours of training. Macolm Gladwell said in his new book Alien:Tales of Successful persons that no matter the best athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians or scientists, after investigation, you will find that they have worked hard for at least ten years, not less than three hours a day. There is an example in the book: Maxim Vengerov, a 34-year-old world-class violinist, was born in Siberia. He got his first violin at the age of four, and since then he has shown extraordinary talent. However, his talent is directly proportional to his contribution. He practiced for 7 hours every day, gave a recital at the age of 5, and won an international prize at the age of 15. Vingerov said: "My mother comes home at 8 o'clock every night and teaches me the violin until 4 o'clock in the morning after dinner. It was torture for a four-year-old child, but two years later I became a violinist. "
Many people are complaining that there is no chance. Actually, it's not. Frank Freddy, a professor of sociology at Kent University, believes that people who spend a lot of time practicing effectively will naturally have their own luck: "They are almost demanding, and when luck comes, they are ready." This is an old saying of China-"Opportunities only favor those who are prepared." Don't complain if you don't get the chance. The first thing you should reflect on is yourself. What aspects are you not prepared for? According to our experience, only by sticking to one direction for at least five years can you get rewards, which will have a long-term impact on your future career development. At the same time, it is the accumulation of such a long time that makes your foundation very solid and your steps will be more stable.
In the workplace, there are only two things: one is to do things, and the other is to be a man.
If finding the right goal is to accumulate more core skills and do things better, then learning to be a man is the second important thing to consider in your career development. We even think that being a man is a hundred times more important than being able to do things. Finding a suitable career goal may not be easy for many confused people; But learning to be a man is a professional accomplishment, which can be cultivated by any company at any time. Even if you don't have much breakthrough and growth in your professional skills, good professionalism will increase your chips for your career development from another level. We have also met many incompetent customers, but we have a good attitude and are very positive. They successfully conquered the interviewer with their excellent professionalism and gained good development opportunities. There is a saying, to do things, be a man first. Insufficient ability can be cultivated slowly; But if you can't be a man, in any organization, you will become a street mouse shouted and beaten by everyone.
In the practice of being a man, there are four elements that can have a fatal impact on your future career development:
The first is your interpersonal skills.
This includes relationships with your boss and colleagues. A bad relationship with your boss directly determines your promotion. So I often say to our customers, "If you have a bad relationship with your boss, it basically means that your career in this company is over." And I don't have a good relationship with my colleagues. Even if one day you are promoted to their leader, your power will be shelved because of the lack of "mass base". Your subordinates either don't listen to you or deliberately provoke you, and you will find that leading this position is actually very uncomfortable.
The second element is to build the ability of continuous learning.
We should pay attention to the importance of study. Last year, we met a client, who was nearly 40 years old and worked as an accountant for 14 years, but he was still only a grass-roots supervisor, and there was no chance of promotion in the company, and his salary had not been raised for many years. We asked him a question, "During 14 years, did you receive any training, further study or other forms of charging?" He said, "No.""Never?" "Never." This is an extreme example, but this phenomenon is very common in the workplace. Regarding your study and growth, I might as well ask myself a few questions: Compared with a year ago, has my professional ability improved significantly? Do I have my own unique views in theory and practice? If I encounter something within my responsibilities, can I handle it independently? Do I have independent ability? Thickness determines height. The reason why you have accumulated thickness lies in your continuous strengthening of learning ability. Without study, your career development will stagnate. You think you haven't regressed, but everyone else is making progress. The gap between you and others has widened unconsciously, so you regressed.
The third element is to build professionalism.
Whether you have a goal or not, whether you want to do this job or not, as long as you are in this position, you must do things well. Getting a job in his post is a minimum professional accomplishment and an indispensable professional spirit in any post. Since you are in this position, your job responsibilities require you to do a good job; If you don't want to do it well, then leave and don't waste everyone's time here. Good professional quality is sometimes more important than ability itself.
Good professional quality is an essential quality for many outstanding people to succeed. Even if you don't like this job, don't treat it in a negative way, because you are wasting not only the company's time, but also your own. In the workplace, you can gain nothing more than two things: one is reward, and the other is growth. Before you have a clear goal, do the things in front of you to the extreme, and try your best to get everything you can in this position. If you have a negative attitude towards your work, you will go home empty-handed.
The fourth element is to have a strong heart.
Many people I meet are actually very fragile and can't stand all kinds of hardships along the long road of life. You know, everyone's growth is not smooth sailing. Even Jesus, why not accept the baptism of suffering? A strong heart can make a person see hope in despair, and negative pessimism will only make you miss the opportunity in front of hope. There is a line in The Shawshank Redemption: "cowardice imprisons people's souls, hoping to feel free. The strong help themselves, and the saints help others. You can't be a saint, but you must be strong. " Natural selection, survival of the fittest "Survival of the fittest is always the eternal law of natural progress. Only by adapting to this rule can you gain a place in such a competitive society.
After 30 years old: how to achieve a qualitative breakthrough
Career development after the age of 30 should no longer be stagnant. If you want to make great progress in your career after the age of 35, you should make good use of the five years from the age of 30 and prepare the following three crucial things:
The first thing is to complete your professional brand building.
How to build your own personal brand? After you reach the age of 30, you must not change jobs frequently. The biggest disadvantage is that your professional knowledge growth will remain at a relatively low level, which will affect your promotion and salary increase. What should I do? What suits me? At this time, I should have a clear and definite orientation and use the remaining five years to accumulate. Otherwise, the "35-year-old phenomenon" will definitely be staged on you.
Kenichi Ohmae, the "father of Japanese strategy", also put forward this view in his monograph Professionalism: "Why did you win? What will affect the world in the future is the competition between individuals. Can you dominate the world stage and forge the core competitiveness that others cannot surpass? Your only dependence is professionalism. " Are you a first-class business person or an ordinary office worker? This is the difference! Giving yourself a career orientation and establishing your own brand image will add more valuable chips for your future career development. We have met customers who have changed jobs 13 times in five years, and have been exposed to more than 10 industries. If you do the same, you will be unprofessional.
Of course, in order to support your professional brand image, you need to make efforts in the following two aspects:
The first aspect, that is, the knowledge structure we mentioned earlier, should be divorced from specific operational problems, set its sights higher and farther, and become a person with "foresight" rather than "shortsightedness". You should look up to the best people in this industry, take them as the goal, take them as an example for your own cultivation and growth, and make up the gap step by step with Excellence. At this time, on-the-job study, further study, training and so on need to be put on the agenda, and learn to enrich your mind with new knowledge.
The second aspect is to establish their own influence in the industry. Excellent talents in every industry have their own gathering circle. For example, Harvard Business Review Network, Professional Manager Network and Salesman Network are all places where relevant talents gather. Why do some people need tens of thousands to go out and give a lecture? Why can some people use their own strength to promote the development of an industry? The reason is that their influence is too great. If you want to be an excellent professional, you must establish an influence in this industry and influence others with your thoughts, just like the best people.
We met a very nice young man last year, and we are still impressed. He is a junior college student, majoring in printing. After graduation, he went to the printing factory to do sales. Maybe in some people's eyes, this major, this position, nothing special. But it is such a seemingly worthless position that he has established his influence in his own unique way. He set himself a requirement: write an article every month and publish it in the most influential magazine in this industry. Of course, not every article can reach the quality of publication, but it is necessary to ensure the quality of writing an article every month. The advantages of doing so are: first, establish your influence in this industry; Second, it allows you to form your own knowledge structure. We mentioned the problem of knowledge structure earlier, and we need to emphasize it again here. After all, the knowledge you gain through study and training belongs to others, not to yourself. In order to form your own knowledge structure, you need to apply these foreign knowledge to your work practice. In practice, the same knowledge theory, under different circumstances, everyone's feelings and experiences are different. The process of writing an article is also a process of summing up and reflecting on one's feelings and experiences in practice. The knowledge structure formed in this process can really be called your "own" knowledge.
The second thing is to cultivate yourself into an excellent manager (here refers to the middle manager, which is also your first manager goal).
In addition to people who are very keen on technology, promotion in their posts is essential if they want to gain more space in the workplace. Some people will say that I don't want to be a leader. I just want to do my job well, and I'm satisfied. For those who have this idea, I can only say I'm sorry, it's not your choice. The reason is simple: you can be a basic employee at the age of 25; At the age of 30, you can also be a basic employee; But when you are over 35 years old, if you just want to be a basic employee, it is not realistic. We mentioned the "35-year-old phenomenon" earlier. If a 35-year-old person's ability is still limited to basic posts, then such a person is basically worthless (except of course backward state-owned enterprises and institutions). Therefore, whether you like it or not, you should regard job promotion as an important goal on your career growth path and work hard for it.
Becoming a manager is a key step in your career development. The future development space is inseparable from this promotion. But not everyone can sit firmly in this seat. Gallup once conducted a survey and found that the reason why basic employees frequently leave their jobs is often not the company, but its boss, the middle manager of the company. In our career planning consulting experience, we often encounter such a problem: it is precisely because of poor middle management that it has a very adverse impact on the development and growth of subordinate employees, leading to their career development not only in professional ability, but also in professional quality.
Let's not discuss how important the "middle crisis" is to the company's development for the time being. From a simple point of view, you must realize that your management may change the lifelong fate of your subordinates, and it is your wrong management that unconsciously hurts your subordinates and forces them to leave the company. Managers hate people who change jobs frequently when recruiting employees. But as a bystander, I have to say: when you are complaining about the unfaithfulness and low quality of job seekers, have you ever considered establishing a benign talent growth mechanism so that everyone can grow? While complaining about the shortage of talents, have you seriously considered how to train talents? Many companies will say that we have cultivated it, but we can't keep it. In the end, we all make wedding dresses for others. This is not worth the loss, so we are not so keen on talent training. But this is exactly the problem: why can't you keep people? If every enterprise does not cultivate talents and wants to eat "ready-made", then the final consequence is that all enterprises will face the situation that no one is available!
When your growth is hindered by your boss, it is your misfortune, and you can choose to "vote with your feet"; When you become a manager one day, we don't want to pass this misfortune on. Only in this way can the cultivation of talents enter a virtuous circle and everyone can find their place in the workplace. There are many difficulties in this, but I hope that people with ideals can make continuous efforts and slowly change all this.
The third thing is to find a growing company and grow with it for a relatively long time.
In the process of growth, it is very important to find a company with growth potential and development space and grow together with the company. First, you can witness the growth process of a company from small to large, from weak to strong, have a deeper understanding of the company's operation, and also appreciate the position and role of your role in the company's growth. Second, in the process of the company's growth, your value will have more room to play and it will be easier to show it. Many people tend to look for big companies when looking for jobs, which is understandable, but in order to grow rapidly, it is actually a better choice to find a growing, small-scale company. Because in the process of growth, the demand for talents will be more urgent, and your position will be promoted faster. Third, your loyalty will bring more returns to your development. Loyalty is one of the most important things for enterprises to employ people. No enterprise likes its employees to change their minds frequently. Especially when the turnover rate and turnover rate of many enterprises are high, loyalty has become a very valuable professional spirit.
No matter you are now in the "third grade" or on the way to the third grade, please always tell yourself: don't waste your good years, seize all the time you can and accumulate more thickness for your life. When you get old, look back on your life. Do you want to live a happy life or a life of regret?
Finally, I borrow my favorite Steve Jobs quotation as the end of this article. "People can't do too many things in this life, so everything should be done brilliantly. Your time is limited, don't live for others. Don't be limited by dogma, don't live in other people's thoughts. Don't let other people's opinions affect your inner voice. The most important thing is to follow your heart and intuition bravely. Only your heart and intuition know what you really think, and everything else is secondary. "
When you feel that your income is inferior to others, don't compare with others casually, because you never know what others have paid behind earning income. Similarly, when our life is inferior to others, there is no need to envy, because our quality of life is created by ourselves. If you think your life is not good enough, you are not working hard enough. In fact, it is easy to persist for three days, but it is difficult to persist all the time!