Career Anchors

What drives you to be good at your job?

Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.

Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!

It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone’s getting asked, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”

It’s a time for reflecting on the past year, setting some professional goals for the next step in your career, and maybe a little hand-wringing. While there are lots of strategies for seeing your resolution through, you still need to set one in the first place. Unless you hit a “Eureka!” moment over the new year holiday, it can be a struggle to come up with professional goals that walk that delicate line between stressful pressure and motivation. You want to push yourself, but you also want to aim for something you can actually achieve so you don’t set yourself up for failure this time next year.

Take a breath. There’s a way to do this right.

Setting a resolution or defining professional goals for 2022 (or any year, for that matter), shouldn’t be about how much stress you feel you can take on. It should be about understanding a few simple things about yourself:

  • Where you are: What level are you at in your career? What skills do you have that set you apart?
  • Where you’ve been: What kind of education or skills have you acquired? How far have you climbed the ladder so far?
  • What you need: Where are your skills still lacking? What are your career anchors?
  • What you want: How will you make a meaningful impact with your career, both for yourself and for society? What is your personal mission?
  • How to get to where you want to be
  • Career Anchors

    What drives you to be good at your job?

    Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.

    Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!

To help you get started with the how, here’s a countdown of the top advice for setting professional goals, as shared by GLOBIS Insights expert voices in 2021!

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Transcript:

5) Find a mentor.

Misato Nagakawa: Finding a mentor is a life journey. Unless you talk about yourself, what kind of opinions you have towards specific social issues, or what kind of issues you’re facing in your career, nobody can help you. So it’s a lifelong journey, but if you want to have a mentor, you should keep talking and keep sharing what kind of issues you are facing and what kind of opinions you are having.

4) Become a storyteller.

Jonathan Soble: Everybody should learn how to tell a story, because everybody does tell stories. You have to convince people of things. You have to get your ideas across. So it’s a universal skill. If you want to be a storyteller in front of an audience but you’re too shy, start small. Start with your family, your friends, your cat even. You’ll gain the confidence and the appetite to tell more stories.

Crowded yellow Post-It notes show new year resolutions, including professional goals
So many resolutions to choose from, so little time! | iStock/filo

3) Never settle.

Francis Fung: It’s absolutely never too late to change your career, whatever the age. The things you have to bear in mind: You have to know what’s not working so you can avoid it for the next job. You have to realize what is working so you can go and find it again. And you need to know your next three-to-five-year plan. But you should absolutely never settle in into a job or career just because you feel it’s too late or you’re too old to change.

2) Know when to walk away.

Tadahiro Wakasugi: Stress is actually beneficial. Because we experience stress, we grow. Because we feel stress, we learn something new. We grow into a better leader. So stress, in itself, is not bad, actually. The problem here is that you don’t take a break. That becomes really painful. So when you need a break, take a break,

1) Have a Plan B.

Olivier Fabre: You need to have a Plan B for everything. Even if it’s just looking out for yourself or other jobs that may be important. Even a company that’s really the best fit, maybe you want to try something else, challenge yourself. Make sure you are in charge of your career and somebody else is not.

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