INTHEBLACK September 2021 - Magazine - Page 59
AT A G L A N C E
According to career
development professionals,
the concept of a linear career
path has long been a myth
perpetuated by an emphasis
on career planning.
An excessive focus on mapping
out a career for the long term
can mean a failure to appreciate
opportunities that can arise
out of a career taking an
unexpected turn.
Instead, it is important
to learn how to live with
uncertainty and not place too
much importance on setting
rigid targets.
C A R E E R B R E A K S , R E D U N D A N C I E S , PA N D E M I C S A N D S I D E WAY S M O V E S
— C A R E E R P R O G R E S S I O N I S A N Y T H I N G B U T L I N E A R T H E S E D AYS .
CONSTANT
CROSSROADS
STORY JOHANNA LEGGATT
L
ike many highly skilled professionals, Michelle
Johns assumed she would steadily climb the
corporate ladder and eventually arrive at the
top job.
Johns set her sights on the role of CFO, but the further
Johns advanced in her accounting career, the less she
aspired to join the C-suite.
“I began to realise that I wasn’t excited by the notion
of being a CFO,” she says. “So, I started to apply for roles
internally to find out what else I was interested in and
that allowed me to take on a new project.”
One such new project involved helping colleagues
managing change, and it proved to be a lightbulb
moment.
“I realised I loved helping people navigate change
within an organisation, and I wanted to help people
do this full time,” she says.
Johns knew that she would struggle to move from
financial planning and analysis management to change
management internally, so in 2014 she quit her job and
set up a change management consultancy.
“I didn’t have a lot of fear, but everyone else was fearful
for me, and they said how brave I was,” she recalls.
“I didn’t see it as courage. I just knew I had to do it,
otherwise I would be comfortable – and yet unhappy –
for the rest of my career.”
UPSKILL NOW
Discover CPA Australia’s
Micro-credentials
UNPLANNED CAREER DISRUPTIONS
According to Jim Bright, organisational psychologist and
professor of career development at Australian Catholic
University, the linear career path has long been a myth.
“The non-linearity of careers has been around forever,
but no one’s ever talked about it, because there has been
this obsession with career planning and where you’re
going to be in five years’ time,” he says.
“But this kind of planning often fails to appreciate all
of the contingencies that occur in people’s lives.”
According to Bright, who co-authored The Chaos Theory
of Careers with Robert Pryor, careers routinely go “off track”.
“In the work we did in the early 2000s, we consistently
found that 60 per cent to 80 per cent of people had
experienced an unplanned event that significantly
influenced their career,” he says.
As Bright points out, many employees are nevertheless
shocked to discover that despite their “best endeavours
and despite producing great products and being wonderful
employees with great performance appraisals” there are
often events – be they a global pandemic or company
mergers – that disrupt their career plans.
“These events can profoundly change the way people
work,” he says. “And that could happen very suddenly.”
Employees, for example, may be injured, which
precludes them from working in their field, or they
could be made redundant.
The unexpected event can also be positive, Bright notes.
“It could be a chance meeting leading to a new career path
and a new opportunity,” he says.
Instead of advancing up a career ladder, rung by
rung, Bright sees the modern world of work as akin to
intheblack.com September 2021 59