Johari Window Model
The Johari Window Model is a self-awareness framework that helps you better understand . . . you. Learn how its four quadrants can help you identify gaps between how you see yourself, and how others see you.
Sunk Costs
Wondering if you should continue an investment or look for something new? Sunk costs can have a powerful psychological impact on decision-making. Learn how to recognize them to ensure rational decisions.
Finding Your Life Purpose with Ikigai
Ikigai can guide you in your quest for self-discovery. Listen to Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi explain why and how.
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!
Have you ever wanted to make a career change, but talked yourself out of it?
The older we get, the easier it is to think it’s too late for a new start. As lecturers at an MBA school, GLOBIS University faculty are used to professionals at all levels asking for career change advice. Their response often requires self-reflection on three key things:
- The mindset to understand what you’re looking for
- The practical skills you have or need
- The courage to seize opportunities
Personal Development Mindset
A career change just for the sake of change is likely to lead you from one unsatisfying option to another. To ensure your career path, work-life balance, and even cover letter are on point, start with some self-reflective questions. There are also frameworks you can utilize to align your personal development mindset.
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!
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Critical Questions for a Career Change
One essential step I suggest in my TEDx talk on making a career pivot is that you need to know why, at a very fundamental level, you want to change your career. That means looking deeper into what you want, beyond knowing that you want a new job.
Ask yourself some critical questions.
- What is it that you are looking for in a new career? You might not just be looking for a new employer. Maybe there are groups or people you want to work with. Maybe there is a lifestyle that you are aspiring to which is incompatible with your current work.
- What kind of work do you love? Knowing that can give you a better sense of what truly motivates and drives you, which can widen the possibilities beyond simply changing employers. Maybe you can start your own business, go back to school, write, volunteer, have a portfolio career, or do project-based work to support the lifestyle you want.
Identify those core reasons you want to switch careers. Then consider all possibilities.
—Darren Menabney, Innovation through Virtual Teams
The Hedgehog Concept
The first thing you should do is reflect thoroughly on your career design. To do that, ask yourself the following three questions:
Finding Your Life Purpose with Ikigai
Ikigai can guide you in your quest for self-discovery. Listen to Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi explain why and how.
1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What can you be the best in the world at? How can you continue to grow for that?
3. What drives your economic engine?
These three questions reveal your sense of passion, ability, and profit. They’re introduced as the Hedgehog Concept in the book Good to Great, and they can help provide clarity for both corporate management and individual careers.
However, when you’re facing a career shift, it is necessary to think beyond work. Also consider your health, family, and community. All of that together will lead to deeper reflection.
Think about it like this: If you live to be 100, work probably won’t be the center of your life. When fortune calls, don’t hesitate to take the opportunities that come!
The Johari Window Model
Regardless of age, a “good” career change expands a person’s possibilities and life options.
In other words, the greatest benefit of a career change is the chance to encounter a new you. There’s a framework for self-awareness and bias avoidance called the Johari Window Model, developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955. It can help you understand yourself and see a world you have never seen before.
Johari Window Model
The Johari Window Model is a self-awareness framework that helps you better understand . . . you. Learn how its four quadrants can help you identify gaps between how you see yourself, and how others see you.
Any event in front of you can be an opportunity or a threat depending on perspective. Your perspective can be defined by company goals, meaning of existence, or position in the company. That means changing careers can be the greatest advantage or disadvantage of your life, depending on how you think.
—Takatomo Itoi, Business Transformation through Innovation
Practical Self-Assessment of Skills
Self-reflective questions about what you want are an important first step, but you also need to consider practical tools to support a healthy career transition. These will do more than get you in the door—they’ll also ensure long-term success and help you build trust with a new employer.
Objective Skill Assessment
To meet the challenges of a career change, start by considering your skills objectively. Divide them into general skills, industry-specific skills, and firm-specific skills.
If you find that your proportion of firm-specific skills (that is, skills unique to your current company) is relatively high, you may face difficulties when you change careers. But this can also provide guidance on where you need to upskill and become more well-rounded.
When you’re considering a career change, find which skills you lack and ask yourself, “What is the percentage of my general skills? How can I raise it?” Then take the necessary actions.
—Takatomo Itoi, Business Transformation through Innovation
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The Essential Career Change Checklist
Sunk Costs vs. Opportunities
Benefits and drawbacks are often two sides to the same coin.
Let’s consider drawbacks first. The biggest drawback for many folks in their forties or fifties is feeling you can’t give up your current job. You might feel like you’d be throwing away all that time spent at your current employer or line of work. Maybe you’ll lose all business relationships and networks.
This fear prevents many people from changing careers—it is a manifestation of the sunk-cost fallacy. The sunk-cost fallacy is our tendency to feel like we have to continue something if we have already invested a lot of time, energy, or resources, even though continuing is a bad idea.
Sunk Costs
Wondering if you should continue an investment or look for something new? Sunk costs can have a powerful psychological impact on decision-making. Learn how to recognize them to ensure rational decisions.
Instead, try to see your invested time and resources as a benefit, not a drawback.
Of course, everyone’s situation is different, but by the mid-career point in our lives, many of us have the resources—networks, savings, assets—to find that new career. Our professional and personal networks give us the connections we need to find a new employer or customers. Our savings and assets may cushion us from a temporary earnings drop. Our reputation and credentials give us the social capital we need to move into a new line of work.
In fact, a career change can be easier in your forties or fifties if you can get over that sunk-cost fallacy.
—Darren Menabney, Design Thinking & User Experience
Courage to Seek and Seize Opportunities
No career change is possible without a little courage. Are you letting your anxieties hold you back? Or recklessly ignoring blind spots for fear of seeming inexperienced?
Here are some tips.
Open doors.
If you are at the door of a new opportunity and wondering what to do with it, here’s my advice: Don’t worry about what will happen when you open the door.
Anxiety is a waste of energy. So don’t think about things like, “I may not do well,” or “I may not be able to fulfill my responsibilities.”
Instead, embrace your desire (even if it’s a small one) to look outside the box and open the door. There are views and people that only those who open the door can see. Even if things do not go well, you will learn something from the experience.
Also remember this: You neither need to compare yourself with others nor rush to open the door. Step out of your box at your own pace. Accumulate experiences as you fulfill your desire to be what you want to be.
That’s how you grow and mature as a person.
—Emi Ikeda, Organizational Behavior & Leadership
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Career & Life Advice for All Ages from Alan Patricof
Hold Back to Grow
There are two things I tell anyone who has decided to make a career change:
- Be intentional about holding your strengths back.
- Don’t limit your challenges—challenge your limits.
Hold back your strengths.
It’s instinctual to use our strengths to build a foundation for success in a new environment. But I often suggest the opposite.
Dare to seal your strengths away. This will reveal opportunities to build new strengths in an unknown area. You can always integrate your known strengths later.
For example, many new graduates and mid-career professionals join consulting firms with the desire to acquire consulting skills. But they often fall back on their existing strengths due to high pressure in a tough environment.
Challenge your limits.
Many people tend to be conservative or passive in a new environment, trying to ensure that they achieve results early. But a positive attitude, acceptance, and knowledge gained from failures as well as successes will lead to the development of your career.
In an era of rapid change and an unpredictable future, it is more important to dare to take on challenges. Don’t be overly cautious. Don’t limit your challenges, Challenge your limits.
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