The Right to Be Remembered

Peter Weddle has provided great insights into HR, recruiting, and recruitment advertising over the years. Here is another one. Thanks Peter! Ev Privacy advocates are fighting for the right to be forgotten on the Web. Online mistakes are visible to everyone, so we need to be sure they won't live on forever. In today's workplace, however, we require a different kind of guarantee. We need to preserve our right to be remembered. It used to be that managing your career was a lot like riding a bicycle. With an occasional pump of the peddles, you could coast for quite awhile and still move forward. Rely on such a leisurely pace today, and you're likely to suffer a violent crash or what most of us call unemployment. Why? Because many our employers are now suffering from "employment dementia." They don't recognize all of the contributions we've made to their success in the past, and they can't remember what we did for them just the other day. Our track records have faded away, and our contributions have been lost. This condition isn't something employers chose to experience. It was imposed on them by the fierce competition they face in the global marketplace. That challenge comes at them without let up and from every direction. The pressure is intense, the demands are enormous. In such an environment, survival (let alone success) demands ever higher levels of performance from everyone on the payroll. The only thing employers remember is "what you can do for them next" rather than "what you did for them in the past." How to Reinforce Your Employer's Memory Being remembered begins with being proactive in your career's management. As I describe in The Career Fitness Workbook, building a healthy career is just like building up your physical fitness. You have to take personal responsibility for making it happen, and you have to work on it every single day. And that's a challenge. We humans are prone to a fitness-sapping disease called OBE - overtaken by events. We do all the right things - we set goals for our career, we start exercising to increase its strength, reach and endurance - and then life gets in the way. Our boss or our job suddenly needs our full attention, and our self-improvement get sacrificed. How can you avoid this debilitating situation? Do all the right things and monitor your progress. Give yourself a Quarterly Performance Review. Sit down quietly and evaluate your progress. If you've stuck to your career exercising regimen, give yourself a pat on the back; it you've let your commitment slip, determine how best to get back on track. Finally, ask yourself if you're making sufficient progress to be remembered. How can you tell? The effort you've made in the previous quarter must have produced a "career victory" - an advance in your knowledge, skills, ability, wisdom, or experience that's worth telling others about. In other words, the outcome of each 90-day commitment to building career fitness should be a memory - a memory that you share with your boss and your employer. That's the secret to achieving durable employment security in a demanding global marketplace. You do it by being remembered over and over again. Thanks for reading, Peter Visit me at Weddles.com