Guidance: Who are You?

Know Your Mentality

Careers begin with a determination to get and hold a job: it is then up to everyone to grow within the workplace and through work-related interactions.

So it is a good idea to get a good fix on your approach to success as soon as you can.

If your are market-centred, then you must and will accept that making money is a life-long personal imperative and ethical obligation.

For everyone else, prospering remains mightily important, and you certainly don't have to be primarily market-centred to get employed and have a career in business. In any case, this framework applies with only minor modifications to non-profit organizations and government agencies, where many of you will be working.

TOP Note: Although this framework focuses on those of you who are market-centred, references are systematically made to the other six mentalities, indicating likely experiences and relevant choices for you. Remember that you will probably have a primary and a secondary approach. It should be easier for you if you have a good sense of what they are and how they affect you.

Get to Know the Growth Process

Natural Entrepreneurs Read This First

This career process is not suited to highly entrepreneurial individuals. If you are indeed one of life’s natural entrepreneurs, you do not want a job at all—you want to own and control your own business. If successful, you will intuitively recognize and spontaneously observe the various principles to be outlined.

You might benefit from considering how to draw the best from your employees.

Applications of this Interacting-for-Benefitframework in relation to developing a business might be more relevant for you.

Just Starting Work?

If you are young, keen to make your mark and wondering what personal challenges lie ahead, you may be surprised by some of what you see here. Your task is to get to know yourself and the realities of employment. As the framework as a whole covers your next 30-40 years, it may be overwhelming; so visit regularly to reflect and re-think.

Well Into Your Career?

You can compare what is written here to what it was like when you first entered the workplace. This framework will be useful if you want to:

• see your future, or
• reflect on your past, or
• see what is going on for you at work now.

An Advisor, Mentor or Consultant?

This framework can be usefully in appreciating where the person you are helping is at, in their head and in their career. You may find particular value in the applications at the end dealing with team-working and leadership development. The important thing is to be realistic and avoid placing unreasonable expectations on people.

Other Career Tools

This framework, important as it may be, is not the last word in career development.THEE contains other t2els and frameworks relevant to both choosing and progressing within a career. If this topic is of particular interest to you, notify us; our priorities are shaped by user interests and feedback.

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• Start by getting your focus right: you are no longer «a person within society» but «an employee within a business».

• If you wish, see the sequential challenges you must face in advance.

• You can also jump to a synopsis of the career growth process.

Originally posted: July 2009