Last week, there was a local news article about US schools requiring students to take financial literacy classes. I thought it was an appropriate move and also a good time to instil topics such as budgeting, saving and managing debt to high school students. As I recalled in Singapore, there was a focus made on financial literacy, some twenty years ago.The initial spark which triggered this remained obscure but the intention to educate us about personal financial management benefited my journey as a young working adult. There are plenty of financial books in the market today, and some may be more rewarding than others. As these books on wealth management gained popularity, a few provided a guide to financial literacy and aimed to make it simple for readers to learn the importance of financial education: creating wealth, and achieving financial freedom. While there is still more to learn, I believe that most of us, who may not be financially savvy, now have a better understanding of what financial literacy entails.
With the knowledge level of financial literacy growing, where I am going with this point-of-view is why has there not been more awareness made on career literacy? Is it a taboo to talk about your career when you already have a job? If you are a high potential and already doing well, do you need to care about your career or would you rather leave it in the hands of your up-line? A common challenge amongst the working adults, especially those who are approaching their forties, may lack focus on their career development. Could it be that we are too busy doing a good job or maybe it was because we didn’t want change. If you haven’t been thinking, planning, communicating and keeping your resume/skills up to date every year, you may wake up one day to find that you have been replaced. It’s a growing reality especially in today’s world of artificial intelligence robots.
What it is not about? Career literacy is not about helping you further your career but to help develop you professionally as an able-bodied working adult, regardless of age.
I worked in a large corporation for almost 40 years or equivalent to 158 quarters as any IT professional would call it and it was not even my first job. When I graduated as an engineer, I started out working for a semiconductor company for 5 years before it was acquired and today that company is no longer around. What I learned from my first 5 years was that I needed to have a career plan, look for industry trends, learn new skills and make a date in my calendar to do a career switch. Yes, at that time, making a switch was easier. It was easier because I was younger, with no commitments. However, as our life journey goes through different stages, our plan changes too. Although every 5 years, I had a date marked on my calendar to make a switch, it never did happen.
Before I know it, I have stayed in the same organization for almost forty years. However, I did change job roles nine times, without leaving the company. I was blessed to be able to make my career transitions without moving to another company. I moved up, moved down and moved laterally in different local, regional and global roles, from engineering to procurement, to source-to-pay transformation, to information design and to sales operations. I, also, had the opportunity to do an assignment in New York. There are not many companies today that excel in career mobility. Most times, the job roles did not exist. It’s either the job role went away, was moved or a younger talent was ready to replace you. There was only a couple of times that I took the initiative to create my own job role and transition to a new role before the inevitable happened.
The different job roles gave me new experiences and developed me professionally. My professor used to say that we tend to get complacent or stop learning after five years on the same job role. He advised us that we need to make our one-year count so that when you said you have five years of experience, it is not just one-year times five but rather five years’ worth of real experience. What about you? As the new year approaches, what have you learned this year? Are you making a date to reflect on your one year of experience? Choose to be career literate. Make time on your calendar to talk to your mentor, coach or career advisor and discover whether it is time to make the switch in 2024 or would you rather wait to be replaced?
Go on, make-a-date.
