Redefining Professional Growth

Why do we work? Every morning the alarm clock buzzes, we drag ourselves out of bed every morning, drink our coffee to keep us alert, commute and … start doing our jobs. We work because we have to make a living. Sure, no one can deny that… but… is that all? Obtaining wealth and money is the most common desire for most of human kind and we tend to think (and sometimes this feeling is validated by some peers) that we will get more respect the more money we have. It is a confirmation of our success in life, for us and for others. By the same token, many of our fears, stress and insecurities are related to money[1]. So it is obvious to think (and we continuously feed this thought) that we work mainly for money. This being part of the truth of the reasons why people work, there are other benefits other than money and one very important one is that through our jobs and organisations we also become better professionals day after day. And this awareness is crucial to view how our organisations serve as a platform for us to keep developing, learning, experimenting and experiencing new opportunities to become more competent in our profession. If this results in more money at the end of the day is another question, but what it is for sure is that it doesn’t do any harm if that is our end goal.

 We are hired for certain jobs to accomplish certain tasks. We are being paid, trusted and (normally) given all of the resources we need to do our job. We are hired because we have certain skills, talents and abilities necessary to do the job. Because of this and because environments, society and industries change, our jobs become more and more challenging as time passes by. The circumstances of our work - these being the industries in which we currently work, the environment we are surrounded by or the specific challenges of our professions – force us to stretch ourselves, to go outside our comfort zones and challenge ourselves. This “continuous growth”, depending on our personalities and depending on the time we find ourselves in our lives, we might enjoy it or not but it is definitely a benefit that we receive from our work. It is through this stretching of our capabilities that we become better professionals, and it might be fun in the way solving a puzzle or resolving a sudoku is also fun.

 A good friend of mine, with whom I was having coffee the other day, was telling me about his decision to reject a promotion where he was offered a higher paid more senior position in logistics because he wanted to develop himself in other areas. He was offered, so to say, the highway to a great career and he decided to leave it aside for a while because he wanted to learn more about product management and sales & marketing. He was telling me that for him that was worthier than getting a “more senior position”. For him that was what professional growth was all about: to have the opportunity to learn things so that you become a better professional, independent of the impact this decision might have in the future. Because it is not that he was going to leave his logistics job, he was still going to do it but adding up other projects and tasks from the other areas, just for the sake of it. For him that was totally worth it. Through the demands of our jobs and our organisation we can become better professionals because we learn, we challenge ourselves, we overcome fears and we learn new skills and develop other strengths that make us proud professionally speaking.

 At my previous company in Germany for any workshop we led we needed to have a plan B and a plan C, in case anything happened. So that when anything did happen, we would be prepared and everything ran seamlessly as planned. As time passed by, I became a better professional in my job. And this training has followed me and helped me in any professional endeavour I have taken. I am more confident, more resourceful and more skilled in the way I do things. It was not easy and many times I literally rolled my eyes to express my impatience of preparing everything with so much detail, but it was a great experience, for which I cannot be grateful enough.

 Going to work and having a job that gives us the resources to make a living also gives us the opportunity to learn, to socially interact, to be part of a team, to get feedback on the work done, to get a sense of achievement through the completion of goals, to get mentoring, training, to engage in tasks that interest us and in which we are able to use the best of our abilities, talents and competences.

 Of course, few jobs give us all those features and none have all these features all the time, every day. But we have them and, more importantly, we can get them if we search for the opportunities that already exist. And since sometimes it is not necessarily fun, we don’t think of it as a benefit we have from work. We think of it as something we “must” do and, therefore, something of no benefit.

 Professional growth is sometimes misunderstood as people think of it in terms of status, money, promotions, becoming a CEO or having your own company. In the focus group we led for our research for the Emotional Salary Barometer people said “there is less acceptance that some people are just happy being an employee. You can grow professionally in other ways – learning new things and having different experiences” and this is exactly what we mean by it.

 There is also this thinking that by growing professionally you give up growing personally. In our opinion, one should never give up growing in every aspect of our lives. This is what makes life such an amazing experience, because we will always find opportunities to grow. For example if a person tells me that after working for years to get to a certain position and finally having achieved it now she realises that it’s not what she wanted after all, for us this situation is an opportunity to find new ways of growing professionally (by searching what else she can do) and personally (by going through the self – knowledge and reflection journey of what she really is searching for). At the same time, if a person finally gets a promotion she was yearning for, it is also a great opportunity to keep on learning new skills and facing new challenges.

 Professional growth is about being aware of those opportunities that expose you to challenging work, tasks, projects, experiences, opportunities to continue to develop skills and the ability to stay intellectually alert and, as a consequence, becoming a better professional.

[1] American Psychological Association “Stress in America – Coping with change” 2017