LIVE HELPCareering and Careening: Optimizing Your Life Science Career
Piece #1: Careering and Careening
Peter C. Johnson, M.D.
This is the first installment of what will be a series of essays that review essential issues that impact your career. In this initial essay, I would like to share a philosophy regarding an approach to your career in this time of occupational upheaval.
You may think of a career as a logical, orchestrated path that is taken through one's working life. At the same time, you may feel that something is out of sync with this notion today. For most of us, careers have become anything but orchestrated and may sometimes not even be apparently logical in their progressions. Most sources today indicate that the average person will have not one but up to seven careers and ten or more jobs or more as they traverse a lifetime of careering.
Why is this and why does it surprise us when we hear it?
We are all aware of the accelerated communication within society, our vastly enhanced mobility, the globalization of business and other potential underpinning factors. However, understanding the potential factors at play does little to thwart your anxiety in the midst of the process. We have all seen venerated companies swept aside by the tide of change, malperformance or both in seemingly an instant. We have gone from a world in which Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary work for a single employer for their entire careers to one in which we are Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary, finding ourselves continuously retooling our resumes as change disrupts our employment. We tend to view all of this as a negative when, in fact, such change probably enhances our ongoing awareness and education, albeit alongside some economic and emotional angst.
So what is the best way to adapt to a world in which careers are more like sinuous rivers than long, predictable avenues? Where in the midst of all of this external change can we impose some control that makes meaning of our lives even as we find ourselves tested in unexpected, disparate environments? It is for the person just starting a career or in mid career that I would like to put forth an adaptive approach to modern careering that may prove to be useful in the process.We'll call it "Careering and Careening."
Words having one letter differences that stand in apparent ironic contrast to one another have always fascinated me. "Careering" and "Careening" are no exceptions–they initially appear to be diametrically opposed to one another. Their meanings will surprise you, though. Let's begin with an assessment of the words themselves.
"Careering" is a strong word that implies directionality, purpose and a degree of preconception. It suggests careful planning of your occupational outgrowth. Oddly enough, however, it also means "to rush," as in this example:"The able driver careered down the backstretch with elan." Conversely, to "careen" is to lurch or swerve off course and it also means to rush. However, its oldest definition, paradoxically, is to turn a ship on its side for examination and cleaning. For example: "The schooner was careened for its annual defouling and painting." In other words, "careening" has a restorative focus in addition to its implied disruptiveness.
The meanings of these words can be diagrammed in the following way:
Careful planning - Rushing headlong - Lurching - Positioning for improvement
Careering Careening
The words "careering" and "careening" are actually and oddly linked along a continuum of meaning. If we trust our linguistic origins, they appear to have been imprinted together for a reason. This becomes even more evident when the diagram is drawn as a circle in which the continuum never ends, as shown below.
This image suggests that to career well, one must also careen – and to careen capably, one must also career. The relationship between the words is therefore not at all one of opposition but rather one of codependence. The gist of this is that while in the midst of your job, working away (careering), you must be prepared for (and welcome) periods in which great reflection must occur, whether imposed by separation from your job or built into a job as it becomes less gratifying to you (i.e., careening). Careening allows you to take into consideration your recent growth as you chart the next phase of your career path, always budgeting for your future stimulation and growth. However, in order to optimize the value of this inevitable process, something must be added to the center of the diagram, and that something is Purpose.
Purpose in your career delineates both the goal of your career and implies what you will and will not do in pursuit of your career. It therefore bounds action in ways that can make an otherwise unpredictable career path (which we can naturally only minimally control today) into one that has a high chance of achieving its ends, regardless of contemporary circumstances.
Let's enjoy some concrete examples of lives that career and careen with and without purpose.
The mythical Will Electron, senior scientist at a top ten biotechnology company was a brilliant student in college but worried the Company's recruiter when he was asked at the hiring interview about his career goal. Will responded that he had never formulated a specific goal but that he "liked science." He was nonetheless hired on the basis of his collegiate work and thereafter enjoyed several years as a technician, then as a junior scientist and finally as a senior scientist.
Will was laid off for a period of five months in the middle of this stretch but did little to pursue other employment during that interval. In fact, during his reentry interview, he was asked where he felt he could be best used. Blankly, he said "anywhere." Ultimately stalling in his occupational growth, Will was recently let go from the company. He received a substantial severance package and an interview schedule with a career counselor. In the first three of his interviews, he has shown no sense of career direction, only hoping to find "something like I had before." When asked why, he replied "because I don't know how to do anything else."
During the same period of time, the also mythical Suzanne Sangfroid, Ph.D,, Will's college classmate at Yale, took a Ph.D., at UMass Amherst and a Postdoc at Harvard, focusing on her lifelong interest in the enhancement of patient care in the developing world. Extraordinarily educated and yet disinterested in an academic career, she took a job with a social sciences institute in Cambridge, MA as a research investigator on soft funding. She earned only modestly but was able to continue to learn from her mentors and from her direct experiences in trips to Africa, Asia, and South America. After three years, the funding ran dry and she and the entire staff were terminated.
She spent a week with her parents in Florida to decompress. Then for two months, she carefully dissected those experiences that she felt were relevant to her lifelong interest. She posted a large sheet of paper on her home office wall and drew a circle in the center containing the worlds "enhanced developing world patient care." Around the circle, she created a mind map whose spokes contained the critical elements relating to enhanced delivery of healthcare in the developing world and she decorated those spokes with elements of her own experience at her previous position. She noted her areas of strength (numbered 1-3) and also her gap areas (numbered 4-7). She made an assessment of how her strengths could combine to make her a candidate for positions that overlapped some of her gap areas, giving her the opportunity to grow in a new role.
In the end, she assembled and presented her experiences in such a way that she became a vibrant candidate for the associate directorship of a new federal program run out of U.S. AID that addressed gender bias in healthcare distribution in the developing world. She impressed her interviewers with her story that clearly illustrated her long held purpose and gave them the sense that she was bright, curious and would stay the course with them. She was hired.
Suzanne performed in this position as predicted, drawing from it all of the education she could while giving the job all she had to give. Within five years she was asked to become the president of a newly founded women's medical college in central Africa. She took the position and has since energized medical education in that corner of the world.
Will and Suzanne had identical SAT scores before college and identical GPAs in college. While Suzanne immediately pursued an advanced degree, Will saw no need to do so. While this may have made the difference in their careers, it is likely not to be the case. The key difference between the two was that Suzanne built purpose into her decision making so that her periods of careering and careening could be focused to allow her to grow and serve optimally.
Having a well-constructed purpose in the center of our circle of careering and careening helps us all to take control of careers that seem to be constantly changing. Having purpose allows careering and careening to work together to create a spiral of value in our lives, avoiding the ennui that too often sets in during modern employment when you can feel jostled by the work world in random ways.
In fact, when we looked at the careering/careening circle earlier, we looked at it in one plane only. In fact, careering and careening together allow us to spiral either upward or downward, depending upon whether purpose guides decisions at each stage–or not.
When approaching a modern career, then, while it is a given that you are unlikely to be doing the same job for any great length of time, this does not mean that you must react randomly to the world's offerings. The saying "well begun is half done" applies here. By spending time at the beginning of your career to define what has enduring meaning to you in your work, you will have the guidance you need to execute well in any position (careering), optimally guide your decision making during periods of unemployment or planned departure (careening) and in the end know that you have been true to your highest, best aims (purpose).
Biology is replete with examples akin to careering and careening, not the least of which are the tides, the seasons and the cell cycle–alternating states, each governed by the equivalent of purpose. Adherence to your life's purpose anchors you within the inevitable changes that natural cycles of business and society impose. Though the world will inevitably be chaotic during the course of your career, you will have the ability to take control of yourself in the process. This sense of inner-directedness is likely to give you great satisfaction as it enhances the impact of your ripening career.
© Peter C. Johnson, M.D.
Peter C. Johnson is president and CEO, Scintellix, LLC and principal, Headway LifeScience Resources in Raleigh, NC. He focuses at the interface of talent and technology to accelerate the enhancement of patient care. He welcomes your comments and can be reached at pjohnson@scintellix.com.
 |