Finding Your Career Path: Your Guide to a Fulfilling Career
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[00:00:00] Hi folks, Dennis Guzik here with the, Be the Ultimate podcast. And today I want to talk to you about using a military planning construct for your own career and planning.
[00:00:18] I was a military planner when I was in the Marine Corps; one of the many jobs that I've held and, really neat. What you do in military planning is you really have three levels of planning, the strategic, the operational and tactical planning.
[00:00:37] The strategic level planning is the highest level of planning. It's the military's contribution to the highest national goals. The operational level of planning are those operations and campaigns that if achieved will lead to accomplishing the strategic level planning goals.
[00:00:57] The operational planning is a series of things that you do, sometimes called campaigns, that if you accomplish them all will lead you to accomplishing your strategic objective.
[00:01:14] Tactical planning, are a series of smaller level tactical maneuver movements. If you get the strategy and the operational planning and the tactical planning and you win the battles at the tactical level, you win the campaigns at the operational level, then you're going to achieve your strategic objectives.
[00:01:32] The other tenant of this sort of planning, is that the strategic level is the most important. Okay. If you get the strategy wrong, strategic level planning wrong, and you win all your battles and campaigns, then you're still not going to achieve what you wanted to achieve at the higher level, because you got that wrong.
[00:01:56] Conversely, if you get the strategic level and at the lower level, one of your attacks fails or you lose a battle, you can still regroup. It's a lot easier to regroup at that level than it is at the higher level.
[00:02:09] So what does that mean for you and thinking about your career. I think about it like this, you should think about your strategic level, career-wise, as what sort of life that you want to live. Think about how you want your life to be daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and what you want to achieve. What is your purpose? What you want to say is this is a good life. And every day be satisfied by the way things are going.
[00:02:44] Think about aspects of it. What are you contributing to society? Where do you live? How much time do you spend at work versus not at work? Do you like to travel? Do you have interests? Where do you want to live? Do you want to live near family, for example. And is that really important to you in your life? Or maybe you really want to live somewhere where it's easy to go skiing?
[00:03:12] Because the lifestyle you want to have is somebody who is able to do the things that they like outside of work. You really want to make sure that you get this right? That you understand the kind of life that you want.
[00:03:27] The next level, using the same kind of a construct, the operational level. I think about this as more of a, so what kind of a career field do I want to be in? What sort of career field is satisfying to me? It has to support my life objectives, my strategic goals. Which is the kind of life that I want to have.
[00:03:50] When you think about some of the career fields out there they're vastly different. For example, if you want to be in the law field, a lot of times for junior people it is very demanding hour wise. If you think you want to have a strategic life balance ,where you're not working 16 hour days, that might not be for you.
[00:04:11] Then the tactical level, I think of this as more as the job that you want to have. So inside a career field, there can be a wide range of jobs. For example, you may decide that in part of what you want out of life is that you help other human beings. And so you decide the career field you want to go into is healthcare. Now, it's so broad, one end of the healthcare spectrum may be a brain surgeon with lots of education requirements, lots of training, residency,, grueling hours, that sort of thing. Another one may be a medical tech with a lot less demand of your time and expenses for education, that sort of thing.
[00:04:57] So there's a lot of options in there. One of the things that you got to do there, if you're thinking about this, is my strategy. How I want my life to be in this kind of career that I want to have. You gotta be honest with yourself about these things as you assess them. Then you can start looking at what kind of a job do you want to have inside of those career fields?
[00:05:17] There's a great source, it's department of Labor's sponsored O*NET online. A great resource for finding things like jobs and interest surveys to help determine jobs you may like based on education and a wealth of additional information is on there. I encourage you to use that as you start thinking about a job.
[00:05:36] So benefit of this approach? I got to thinking about this because I've talked to so many people who say I've got my ideal job out of college. I got the job that I really wanted and I interviewed, did great, and I got the job. Yet, I just feel like something's missing. I don't know if I need to change jobs or what to do. The reason you're in that position is because you didn't take this sort of an approach.
[00:05:59] If you get the strategy right and you work your way down to the job and something doesn't feel good. You change jobs. That's relatively easy, right? It's easier to change jobs than changing your life.
[00:06:13] If you don't think about the strategic level and all you think about is I want this great job because maybe somebody told you, if you do what you love at work, then you'll never work a day in your life. That's just not true.
[00:06:25] So You may like that eight hours or 10 hours a day that you spend at work, but then the other 16 hours a day, you don't like, and you feel unhappy. That can happen if you don't think about the highest level first and work your way down and think about next, what sort of career area do I want to be in? Then next, what sort of a job that I want.
[00:06:48] So, the strategic level is, what sort of life do you want to live. Then the operational level is what kind of a career field do you want to be in. Then the tactical level is what job do you want to have.
[00:07:03] So, hopefully this helps you think about things and I look forward to hearing from you. Bye.
