The beginning of the new year is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the previous 12 months of your career, as well as looking forward to the year ahead. Taking the time to plan your success, while also being prepared to take opportunities that come your way, will help you succeed in 2016, says Hays CEO, Alistair Cox, in his latest
LinkedIn Influencer blog.
Drawing from his own experience Alistair says, “Life is full of surprises so even perfect planning will not necessarily deliver your ambitions. In my experience, it’s been about getting the right balance between planning, executing on that plan and also taking your chances when something unexpected comes along.”
Alistair emphasises the importance of seizing the right opportunities when they are presented to you, even if they weren’t in your original plan. Career success does rely to some extent on planning but it can be down to chance and taking that risk. Alistair says, “Throughout my career, I’ve benefited from regularly taking stock of what I’m doing, what I want to be doing in the medium and long term and finding ways of getting there. However, some of my best ever decisions and moves came from left field. They weren’t meticulously planned in advance, but they were fundamental to my life.”
Alistair offers four suggestions to help people think about their year ahead and how they can make the most of their career.
- Find the right environment to ask yourself some hard questions
One of the hardest parts of planning can be finding the time to do so. However, are there opportunities in your day when you do something, such as exercising or driving too and from work, where you are able to think about your long-term career ambitions? Alistair says, “I often find that my best ideas come when I’m doing something totally different where my mind can wander.” Alistair added “So create the environment where you can freely think without time pressure and without the anxiety of having to come up with an answer.”
- Define your goals and plan to achieve them
Once you have an idea of what you want to achieve, write it down and think about your goals realistically, as well as the necessary steps you need to take to achieve them. Alistair says, “There’s a huge benefit in making the steps shorter term so I know I have to take them. If it’s all longer term planning, the easiest thing in the world is to not worry about it yet and delay action. If your first committed action however is in the next week, it’s much harder to ignore it.”
- Do the same if you’ve just started a new role
Applying the same process when starting a new role can also be beneficial to ensuring your continued success. When you begin the role write down what you want to achieve within the next year to ensure you are both happy and feel as though the year has been well spent. This will help to influence the outcome of your first year in the new role.
- You cannot plan for the unexpected opportunities, but take them all the same
Despite how many plans you may make, life doesn’t follow a blueprint and from time to time will throw surprises and opportunities your way. Looking back at his own career Alistair says there were a number of chance conversations that led him down a different path than what he originally intended, taking him to where he is today. Alistair says, “Making good plans will prompt you into action. However, you must also be adaptable to the opportunities that suddenly appear and take your chances along the way.”
There is no magic formula to planning your career successfully though. As Alistair adds, “When I look at my own experience, the diligence of properly thinking through what I want to do has certainly helped clarify what I am looking for, whether I can find it in my current employer and what specific steps I should take to achieve it.” And even though those surprise opportunities may arise, still having a plan in place will help even if it means deviating away from it, as this gives you something to measure the new opportunity against.
Alistair summarises by saying that there is always a certain level of risk involved when taking a chance but by planning and measuring new opportunities against your plan, this reduces the risk. Alistair concludes, “At the end of the day, nothing in history has ever been achieved without a degree of risk. It’s actually about managing the risk, not avoiding it.”
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About Hays
Hays plc (the "Group") is a leading global professional recruiting group. The Group is the expert at recruiting qualified, professional and skilled people worldwide, being the market leader in the UK and Asia Pacific and one of the market leaders in Continental Europe and Latin America. The Group operates across the private and public sectors, dealing in permanent positions, contract roles and temporary assignments. As at 30 June 2015 the Group employed 9,023 staff operating from 240 offices in 33 countries across 20 specialisms. For the year ended 30 June 2015:
– the Group reported net fees of £764.2 million and operating profit (pre-exceptional items) of £164.1 million;
– the Group placed around 63,000 candidates into permanent jobs and around 200,000 people into temporary assignments;
– 23% of Group net fees were generated in Asia Pacific, 41% in Continental Europe & RoW (CERoW) and 36% in the United Kingdom & Ireland;
– the temporary placement business represented 58% of net fees and the permanent placement business represented 42% of net fees;
– Hays operates in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA