Career Advice - The Holistic Approach to Career Planning

A Message from Michael Emery
Chief of Recruitment, UNDP Office of Human Resources

When it comes to career planning many of us fall into the mode of 'looking for jobs' towards the end of an assignment rather than taking a more holistic approach to planning a career. Particularly in the early stages of an international career it is important that professionals understand that a number of career elements have to be simultaneously addressed in order to maximize the career opportunities available. Most JPOs or Associate Experts will already have a number of elements in place, including appropriate qualifications and experience to be considered for entry-level positions. More often than not most applicants are applying for positions with polished documents (including the P11, Résumé or CV), however, it is still a good idea to have someone cast an 'expert eye' over the documents.

Often an area that requires more attention is networking. Many people make the mistake of only thinking about networking when they are looking for a new job - instead it is important to be building and maintaining networks throughout your professional career. It is also important to remember that networking is reciprocal, and not a 'one way street'. Given that 90% of jobs are secured through some form of networking, it is vital that throughout your career you pay attention to with whom you network, how you network, and where you network. Inextricably linked to networking is the way that you manage your reputation in an organisation. Your professional (and personal) reputation can be an enormously powerful career accelerator, but also a powerful career inhibitor.

Two other important elements in a holistic approach is to think about what makes you happy when you work - your job satisfiers - and what foundational elements underpin your reasons for wanting to follow a particular career path - your values. While it may not always be possible to address all of your job satisfiers and values with particular career choices, it is still important to understand these motivations, so that broader career decisions can be made.

Complementing the reasons why you make career choices, it is also important to look at the types of organisations to gravitate towards - or look at opportunity scans. Over the past 5 - 10 years many international organisations have fundamentally changed in nature, the savvy professional needs to constantly be asking him/herself four important questions:

• How is my organisation changing?



• Do I have the skills, competencies, experience and behaviours to meet these changes?



• What do I need in my professional armory (or what learning do I need) to remain current in either my field or my organisation or both?



• If the opportunity scan indicates that I am not a good fit, what is my exit strategy, and what types of positions will I have a good fit?

Another critical element for all of us, regardless of where we are in our career, is to understand and incorporate job competencies into our career thinking. Like all of the elements mentioned above, job competencies are inter-linked with other career elements. They are important for us to understand the job, when we apply to positions, when we are interviewed, when we set work goals and are appraised, when we plan our learning, and when we look at opportunity scans. They are also critical for young professionals to incorporate into their documents, especially when there are limited years of experience in the professional profile.

Finally, like in many things in life you also need an element of luck when it comes to career opportunities - while this may be true - what is more apparent is that, when it comes to your career, you make your own luck. If you pay close and continual attention to all of the elements, what you are essentially doing is creating the conditions for luck to happen.

Considerations to have from the beginning of your JPO assignment: