Introduction: Career Management Resources for Professionals

Do you want to manage your career? Or do you want your career to manage you?

Career Management Resources for Professionals (also referred to as the Resource) is a tool created to empower you to be the project manager of your career. The Resource is intended to evoke curiosity, increase self-awareness, and learn and reflect on various career management topics. You can use it in whatever way works best for you. 

This Resource is divided into the following units:

Determining Direction
Clarify your strengths, values, and your career objectives.

Demonstrating Skills
Explore and apply relational skills to significantly influence your career trajectory.

Defining Resources
Gather and evaluate career-related information to inform your career goals, and effectively present your unique combination of assets to employers.

Discovering Connections
Build and nurture your community network by developing meaningful relationships.

Each unit consists of a number of modules relevant to effective career management and prioritized by the Royal Roads community. Each module has been developed for you to explore salient points and activities to undertake. This overall structure has been influenced by the self-directed career management framework (Hirschi, 2012) to help you identify your resources (personal assets, skills, mindsets, and community) that are necessary to skillfully manage your career. 

As the project manager you are overseeing a multidimensional, far-reaching project—your career! You need a vision, identify goals, manage multiple moving parts, evaluate, self-correct, communication and decision-making skills, and navigation to change your course through this ecosystem. In addition to, develop situational awareness (SA) “...the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about what is occurring or is about to occur” (Norup, 2020).

Take heed, career management is more than applying to online job postings, writing resumes, and flooding the market with applications hoping a job will materialize (sometimes called the spray and pray approach). Expecting that your resume alone will lead to employment is not a wise strategy in the Canadian context. It is only one element of the project.

Just as you are multifaceted and your many assets are integrated throughout all aspects of your life, the topics in Career Management Resources for Professionals are interrelated. We expect that you will find value as you work through each unit. Whether you choose to work straight through the units, change up the order, or target a few modules, remember you will be moving between pieces of your life and work plans, while at the same time, considering the big picture.

While you can choose to finish one module, your return on investment will be substantially greater if you complete The Resource in its entirety; it offers actionable steps, helping you reach possible outcomes such as entering into the labour market in a new occupation, advancing your career, or starting your own business. We believe investing in yourself reaps rewards and benefits.

Prioritize these actions to continue to effectively manage your career:

• continuing to learn and staying self-aware,
• nurturing your skills, goals, and interests,
• creating a positive outlook to carry you through uncertainty,
• keeping a pulse on the labour market for possibilities, and 
• maintaining your community.

Remember, “learning is about transformation, it’s about change, it’s about seeing yourself in relation to the world differently,” (Lyn in Apte 2003a:92, as cited Apte, 2009, p.170); moving in step with Royal Roads University’s vision: Inspiring people with the courage to transform the world.

Copyright information:

The content of this course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except as otherwise noted: Sketch-based icons are from Creative Stall on The Noun Project, used by permission through their royalty-free license. If re-using these icons, attribution must be given. Videos are linked to their original source, and retain the copyright of their creators.

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