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Taking Charge of Your Development and Your Career

Careers

Bite size

Virtual

Wondering about your next career steps? Feeling stuck or unsure how to optimise your skills for future success?

For anyone wanting to take charge of their career, this 90-minute webinar provides insights, tips and tools.

From attending this programme participants will:
  • Gain fresh insights into current trends in careers
  • Learn new tactics to get more from your work ‘sideways’ as well as ‘up’
  • Create a vision, setting a direction that reflects individual career and development aspirations
  • Reflect on your career journey and generate an understanding of how your strengths and preferences can shape your skills development
  • Clarify next steps and commit to realistic actions

Finding your career sweet spot

Consider the 3 circles of this Venn diagram.

Skill – What are you good at?
Enjoy – What do you like doing?
Market – What are other people willing to pay you to do or to produce?

You may have several answers for each of these questions.

The sweet spot is the overlapping middle, a description of work that – by definition – you’ll enjoy, be good at and more likely to get paid for.
For example, I enjoy playing the guitar, but am not good at it and people would pay me only not to bother them. A non-starter as a career.
I enjoy doing crosswords and am pretty good at them – though I’m well short of any competitive level that might pay me if there were such as thing as prize competitions. Again, a hobby, but no career.

People would pay me to edit their blogs and other writings, and I’d like to think I’d be pretty good at it, but I know from my time as a newspaper sub-editor that I don’t enjoy it enough for it to happily take up much of my professional time.

So, what’s left? Well, it does turn out, contrary to any expectations I had early in my careers as a journalist and then a BBC comedy producer, that I can train people to be better coaches, derive plenty of satisfaction from doing so, and that people are willing to pay me to do it. So that’s in the sweet spot and has become a significant chunk of my work.

What’s in your sweet spot that surprises you?

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