I spent fifteen years creating innovative solutions, processes, customer experiences and business models for global companies. I really enjoyed what I did, in that I got to create idea, bring those ideas to life and then sell the vision to people who said they wanted change but were not really ready to accept or initiate the change required. Switching industries, working in different countries and transitioning to new roles, meant that I was reinventing my role every 18 months or so. Drawing on my corporate experiences, today as a coach, I work with clients who are ready for change and need help defining or fine tuning their career vision or next step.

How big brands are venturing into unexplored turf in Fast Company Magazine, provides some really great examples that illustrate some tactics that you can use to reinvent your careers:

1. In Supersoaker, Nicole Malcolm shares how growing “an $80 billion company like P&G requires a lot of effort. We need to find ideas where we can blow out a concept and make it big.” If reinventions were easy, everyone would be in their ideal role, the difficulty is in starting and progressing to a point where you can actually commit to a specific action. Your ideas will come from articulating your interests, priorities, values, motivations, strengths, career highlights and low-lights. At this stage when working with a client, I create an interests map, that documents the pertinent information my client has shared during our coaching sessions and summarize elements of their career vision for us to ponder. This is a key milestone because you: (i) get a snapshot of where you are, what you want and do not want going forward; (ii) become clearer on your vision and can start to enhance it; and (iii) have a firm idea of the additional information you need to move forward.
2. In Easy Riders, Kal Patel and Rick Rommel share how Best Buy entered a new space. For the entrepreneurialy minded and career switchers, one of the best place to identify opportunities is by looking at industries in turmoil. How can you solve their problems? What strengths can you contribute to the solution?  Once Best Buy settled on an industry, they aggressively experimented with a lot of ideas. Similarly to bring your vision to life, think about two or three Test and Learn Experiments, that  will help you to pilot your new vision and gain the necessary information to determine your next step. One of the challenges of entering a new space, much like when you are considering a completely different career is whether others will take you seriously, Best Buy invested millions to prove themselves, in my clients case they invest a lot of time researching, some cash (not millions mind you) to work with an expert, experiment and perhaps to learn a new skill or two. Loss of credibility is one of the many concerns, my client might have, together we work though this obstacle and others to ensure that they are moving forward courageously.

In part 2, I will share lessons learned from the Aerialist, the Freshmaker and the lovely Bean Queens. In the meanwhile, please share steps have you taken towards reinventing your career. As always if you have any comments or questions, feel free to use the comments section below or email me directly.

Tags: Career Vision, Innovative Career Strategies, Reinventing your career, Where Do You Start?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Career Reinvention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.