Professional Mentoring Unpicked #4

This is the next blog in my short series exploring the key aspects of mentoring others as a professional mentor.

Today I’m looking at Key Aspect 4: Skills, Knowledge, Career, and Personal Growth

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“Mentorship encompasses a holistic view of professional development, including technical skills, industry knowledge, career advancement, and even personal attributes that contribute to professional success.”

Hmmm… how to write something about this that doesn’t sound like self-aggrandisement…

How about this?

I’ve been in Learning and Development for over 35 years – and I’m still waiting to be found out!

Seriously, I came to L&D late, having been a professional actor for some 12 years. In that time, I only acted for about four of those years; for the rest of that time – as my blog page header says – I was many other things, fruit-picker, postman, delivery driver, barman, audio typist/temp, ‘industrial overload’, professional actor, Office Manager, Business Owner, Trainer, IT Training Manager, Head of Technology Assisted Learning and latterly, Learning Consultant with the CIPD and Accreditation Mentor with the LPI. Meanwhile becoming a husband and father of two.

The common thread here was me trying to earn a living and ‘having a go’ at whatever opportunities presented themselves to achieve and sustain that objective. Along the way, I picked up a raft of transferrable skills and have used some or all of them at different stages of my career.

Resilience, flexibility, adaptability, learning, unlearning, leading, sharing, and yes, even performing.

And all the while, waiting to be found out, to be exposed as unqualified, inexperienced, delusional… Imposter phenomena, anyone?

And yet, here we are. Now I’m at the ‘late career/flexible working’ stage, it feels right to be bringing the skills and knowledge developed over the years into my role now as a professional mentor, supporting others on their career journeys.

There is no such thing now as a job for life. We all need to be able to flex, skill up, reskill, recognise our strengths and our areas for development, and take responsibility for our careers – never more so than now.

Let me invite you to take a reflective look back at your career journey so far. How much of it was intentional, planned, achieved? What impact have you had to date? What skills and personal attributes have got you this far?

And how often have you had to roll with the punches, get derailed, start again? What are you doing to prepare for an uncertain professional job market and the different roles and responsibilities therein? What are your transferrable skills? What’s missing?

Let me know if I can help you answer some of those questions and support your career journey.

#Mentoring #PersonalDevelopment #LnD #HR #ProfessionalMentoring #Skills #Impact

 

 

Full Circle

Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

I recently took voluntary redundancy and amicably parted company with my employer.

This, however, was not my first rodeo. In a career of some 40 years, I have taken redundancy three times, for various reasons, none of which reflected fault on my part, but which were business, organisational or personal adjustments. 

The challenge for any individual in these circumstances is to try not to take it personally, nor  consider it as the end of one’s career, but to see beyond the immediate impacts, to look for the opportunities they may present, rather than to catastrophise and assume the worst.

“Easy for you to say”, I hear you say; “you were only part-time - and weren’t you going to retire soon anyway?”

Yes, I was. But I have learned over the years to adopt a more philosophical attitude to these challenges.

 

I recognise here that I write from a more privileged position than many - I was approaching voluntary ‘active retirement’ next year, (and had previously indicated so to my employer); I was already working part-time and flexibly, mostly from home; our children are grown up and our mortgage will be paid off by the end of this year. And I had some potential consultancy work already lined up. Many of my colleagues were not in such a reasonably comfortable place.

So I reflected that maybe it was time for me to step aside, to embrace my ‘active retirement’ as a freelance consultant/coach/mentor, whilst facing into a personally eventful 2025, with significant birthdays, anniversaries and other family celebrations ahead. In so doing, I took myself out of the pool for what my job was to become, hopefully creating the opportunity for other ‘at risk’ colleagues to step in or up, depending on where they were in their careers and personal circumstances - which is what happened.

Now it feels like I’ve come full circle. 

I started my working life as a professional actor. This meant i spent most of my early working years ‘out of work’ (i.e. not acting) but in that time I worked in many other roles - fruit-picker, postman, delivery driver, barman, shop salesperson, follow-spot operator, audio-typist, office manager - with the occasional acting job to keep me on my chosen career path. Acting contracts ranged from 6 weeks to 10 months. And then I’d be back on the job hunt again whilst typing solicitors’ letters, pulling pints or delivering building supplies. It was the original ‘gig’ career.

It was only after I walked away from an acting career which wasn't going anywhere quickly enough, to pursue more security, home and family building, that I realised that along the way I had developed resilience, adaptability and lots of transferable skills. And that I had NOT wasted the first 12 years of my working life - I had been preparing myself for whatever career paths lay ahead.

The story of how I became an IT Trainer, Training Manager and Learning Consultant over the next 30 years is for another time. Sufficient to say that those skills I developed in my early career and my capacity to deploy them and to learn new skills has got me to where I am today.

As we all know, the world of work is changing fast. There is no such thing as a job for life any more. Everyone will face redundancy at some point in their working lives, maybe more than once. Lifelong learning and a preparedness to grasp new skills and opportunities are skills in themselves and it behoves us to embrace them, irrespective of what sectors we may work in.

As I update my own CV, in readiness for another late career flexible working ‘gig’ life, I wonder how you see yourself, your strengths, your successes and what you can do to future-proof your employability. For example, one of the questions - amongst many - I’m asking myself right now is, what skills have I got that AI doesn’t and, if I have any, how can I leverage them over the next few years? And is that even a sensible question?

What questions are you asking yourself about your future of work and how are you preparing yourself for that? Let me know if I can help you with those questions or help you plan your future career strategy. My contact details are in LinkedIn.

Generally Curious

Yesterday, I downloaded Don Taylor's (@DonaldHTaylor) Global Sentiment Survey 2018 report, the results of his annual survey based around one single question, "What do you think will be hot in L&D next year?". It was really interesting to see the "What will be hot?" trends rising, falling or lingering in the rankings over the last four years, with #AI (Artificial Intelligence) being the fastest riser from previous years.

This didn't come as a great surprise to me and, the more I read through the report, the less surprised I was by the rest of the general findings. And I got to wondering why that might be.

The answer seemed to lie in the fact that I keep my eyes open and my ears attuned to what's going on in Learning and Development, Learning Technologies, HR and business, partly because that's my professional arena, but it's also because I am genuinely interested in, and want to know more about this stuff for myself as much as for any current or future clients.

And I'm nosy! But I'm a nosy Generalist. Not just in work, but in life. My 'strapline' in my social media and professional profiles, and indeed, in the title of this blog, is 'I know a little about a lot and a lot about very little'. It's become my Personal Brand. And it reflects my curiosity, my inquisitiveness, my need to maintain and update a personal knowledge bank to enable me to function as a contributing member of the human race, as much as in my professional arena. I read; I watch and listen to the News; I listen to podcasts when I can, I talk to colleagues, friends, acquaintances in social media and in my face-to-face social and professional networks.

So, I wasn't overly surprised about AI being such a high flyer in Don's report, because I've been paying attention. People I follow - in the L&D, HR and Tech arena, but also in the 'real world', the Press, broadcasters, social media, general population and my friends are also seemingly discussing the opportunities and threats of automation and artificial intelligence. I got an Amazon Echo, precisely because I wanted to understand it's capabilities and relevance for both my own professional and personal knowledge.  (So far, it's made shopping easier and it's good source of music and, in my view, it may be artificial, but it ain't yet intelligent!). Now, if someone were to ask me about AI, at least I have an informed opinion. At least I can enter into a discussion about it from a reasonably well-informed position and we can have a good chat about it. Or I can connect them to other people in my network who have more specialist knowledge and experience than I.

And this goes to the heart of my thinking, and my question to you - Are you a Generalist or a Specialist? Do you Look Up from your own safe, 'specialist' position at work or in life, peer over the top of your life/work silo and sniff the air around you? Do you know what's going on in 'the real world'? And are you able to translate that back and connect it into your own life & work and that of others around you? Because nowadays, we need to be able to do just that.

We need to be nosy, inquisitive, curious, interested (and interesting), because we live in interesting times - dynamic, fast-changing, inter-connected, scary times. We need to have the skills to be able to challenge received information, to not accept things at face value, to probe, to explore. We need to build the resilience, attitude and skills that will enable us to flex, adapt, change direction, and/or alter our very behaviours. Again. And again. 

I see many nowadays with a hardening narrowness of view, no peripheral vision, an inability to connect the apparently unconnected, lacking the skills to recognise the impacts of one thing on another and who, consequently, are unable to see and prepare for what may lie ahead. I see it in both my professional and my personal life. And it worries me.

The world is changing. Life is changing. Work is changing. #LookUp!