People often ask me what “career courageously” means. Well, it means more than one thing but if I were to sum it all up into its simplest form, I would say it means taking action in your career to get the results you seek to achieve. The courageous careerer is not satisfied when confronted with an outlined “career path”. In fact the courageous careerer often finds themselves looking for ways to be different…a new angle, a new way to present something, a new approach to getting something done.
One of my favorite courageous career stories goes back to the days when I had only been out of college about a year. I was working for the State of NY at a video production facility, which was my chosen field. In a prior post, I wrote about the life changing incident that I had at this time which caused me to leave my job at the State and also leave behind (according to my family) a “good” job with the “good” benefits. This story pre-dates that story by about 4 years.
In order to get a job at this facility right after graduating from college (typically) you needed to work through a summer in the “summer relief” program. The program amounted to a 4 month full time job where you were rotated between shifts and duties in order to cover for the full time employees as they took time off for family vacations and such. This particular year was my first opportunity to actually be one who might be “relieved” by a summer relief student rather than be the summer relief student myself.
That summer there was a “reliefer” student named Shannon D. Shannon, like many of us had just graduated from a college program in television production and she was getting some entry level work experience during her first summer out of school. In addition to working at the State television facility in the evening, Shannon also had an internship with a small, local video production facility planned for her summer. She worked with us for about a week before her internship started the next Monday.
On her first day at the internship, Shannon observed how the small company operated. She noticed several undefined roles held by various people in the company. She notices some confusion as to how the company operated and a general lack of organization. She went home that night and wrote a brand new operations plan completely redesigning the organization and – simultaneously – creating a new position for herself! She brought her proposal in the very next day, presented it to the owner and she was hired on the spot!
I have no idea what Shannon D. is doing now. She might still be working in video production, maybe she has become an executive or an entrepreneur by now or even a very happy stay-at-home Mom. What I can tell you is that her action that summer was the first example of courageous careering I had ever encountered. Do you have an example of courageous careering?
