Characteristics of Sustainable Careers

Introduction
In today’s tumultuous times, organizational needs and global competition are turning careers upside-down. People are being displaced independent of their wisdom and mastery. The economy has trampled career paths, leaving careers moving in fits and spurts, - or gone altogether. With millions of jobs lost, rigid notions about career choices and career development, with ladders, lattices, linear and lateral career progressions have been tossed out the window.

How can you insulate yourself from lagging economic contractions, from global competition, from shifting skill requirements and rapidly changing technology? Most experts acknowledge that the greatest job growth will center on non-routine, creative, and conceptual careers. The shift in the workplace is clear, but traveling through it may not be as easy.

Unpredictable and rampant economic events, extrinsic forces and internal decisions have once again illustrated that building a sustainable career is up to you. How can you best meet this changing landscape? What is a sustainable career? How can you design a career that will endure and flourish to fit the new landscape of the changing employment market in the next decade? This year, we will explore the leading characteristics sustainable careers share.

Career Planning Behaviors to Build and Manage Reputation
The concept of a permanent job has disappeared from our work environment. The notion vanished with jobs that carried instruction booklets and a book of rules with them. Those were the routinely mechanical jobs, which were outsourced, shipped offshore, automated or computerized. Beginning in 2008, the Wall Street Bank Recession sent millions more of the scripted, repetitive jobs packing and most of them will never return. Two years before the Great Contraction of 2009, twenty million Americans (17%) changed jobs each year. That figure has grown over the last five years. Having a career is no longer about finding the right job and keeping it, but about making continual career choices in response to a rapidly changing workplace. Human capital is no longer delineated by a title or belonging to a particular group. It is defined by skills and relevance. Learning to choose, maintain and manage sustainable careers, challenge by challenge, project by project, day by day, will be the essential ingredients to promote security, self-satisfaction and personal happiness in your career.

We’re Not Talking Jobs Any More
Politicians may be talking about jobs, but we have to stop thinking in terms of jobs and start thinking of careers. Only 41% of workers reported they give conscious thought to their careers and create a plan to support them. The majority leave their career decisions to chance. What’s wrong with allowing other people or external forces make your career decisions for you? Plenty...

We are knee-deep in a world where conceptual, cognitive, creative jobs will multiply while most routine, mechanical, and repetitive jobs - work directed by others - will vanish. It is a place where new generations entering the workforce as well as older displaced workers face far more complex, challenging, and self-directed work. In this changing landscape, personal and organizational success will depend on non-routine, right-brain, asynchronous, fast-paced collaborative, networked and socially meaningful work. It is a landscape where you make the decisions. You make the choices about your own career. This is the world of sustainable careers.

Whether you’re just entering the workforce, an experienced worker, a manager or leader, the secret to success and satisfaction is to connect your innate desire to contribute to others with the current and future needs of society. This could be in finance, transportation, entertainment, security, energy, education, health or other areas that are addressing pressing needs. Each of us yearn to control our own destinies and contribute to something that will endure. Finding a job, any job, is a Band-Aid solution to career success. Understanding the characteristics of sustainable careers and building your career around those can provide a lifeline for a lifetime.

Characteristics of Sustainable Careers: How Does Yours Stack Up?
Before you look for the paths to follow to develop a sustainable career, I suggest you take a closer look at the essence of sustainable careers. What are the most important elements and how can we design around them? As you’re reading each of the characteristics of sustainable careers, evaluate your current career and the path you’re currently following. Answer Yes or No for each of the ten characteristics listed below.

How Secure is Your Career?
Does it ...		YES	NO
1.	Address Important Human Problems and Needs? Sustainable careers address important human problems and needs, requiring novel and innovative solutions, addressing our social responsibility.
2.	Improve the Quality of Life – Yours and Others? Sustainable careers provide better, faster and less expensive goods and services, improve the quality of life and help society move to a different paradigm, required for a healthy and sustainable civilization.
3.	Challenge Your Imagination? Sustainable careers require the human mind – curiosity, questioning, experimenting - and cannot be easily automated by computers or robots, giving the world a continuing flow of novel ideas and innovative approaches.
4.	Fit Your Personality? Sustainable careers play to your natural talents and interests – igniting your passion and fostering the learning required to be masterful at something that you love.
5.	Provide Self-Renewal? Sustainable careers wear well, last, do not disappear and do not deplete your personal resources or those of our environment because they take care of basic human needs that will never disappear.
6.	Generate Your Energy and Passion? Sustainable careers generate energy within and around you, bringing joy, happiness, and a sense of meaning and contribution through solving problems, innovating solutions, and creating new ideas in areas that you care about.
7.	Add Value and Recognition? Sustainable careers are valued by others and contribute to the vitality of your own life, your organization and the planet.
8.	Add Meaning to Your Life? Sustainable careers focus on a need in society that is important and meaningful, giving you a feeling of fulfillment and accomplishment because you are making the world a better place
9.	Present Continual Learning Opportunities? Sustainable careers re-energize your desire to learn, to be challenged, to build skills, and continually forces you to benchmark your skills against changing global competition, new information and new technologies.?
10.	Offer Expansive Relationships? Sustainable careers require a vibrant network of knowledge resources and value-added relationships, giving you timely access to learning and making you a better mentor as well as showing you the need for more mentoring.
	Total – Yeses Total Nos

The fewer yeses you have, the more at risk you are of becoming burnt out, irrelevant, displaced or not advancing. Follow this series of articles for tips on taking on each of the 10 Characteristics of Sustainable Careers.

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