Unless your learning rates (at 40 and beyond) are phenomenal, chances are you will feel like a fossil piece when you emerge out of your secure zone.
When it comes to MARKETING their CVs, people would rather sell big on those 4 assignments done in the last 2 years than the 30 assignments delivered in the preceding 15 years.
Why?
Well, never has there been a time in recent history where old know-how loses its significance as rapidly as it does now. Can configure Novell email? Big on Friendster? Superskilled in Dbase 3.0? Sifu in Programmable Logic Control? Balanced Scorecard guru? 1997 Capital Control Policy Expert? The question is, will you feature these on your 2012 CV? Will these earn you the relevance to that new position you having been eyeing for? The answer is No, they don’t. In most cases, we know they will be relegated to the ‘Non-core Competencies Section’ at the bottom end of the CV.
Does that mean that all that is learned in the past has been futile – like what one studied in university or what one did in the first 5 post-college years as the humble executive in the Credit Control Division? Those were the stepping stones that earned you your current position and that’s that. You can’t market yourself on the project you so successfully launched 10 years back, not unless you are the guys who launched Netscape Navigator or brought Apple II series (we are talking about the first generation PC launched in 1977) to the market.
It’s interesting to know that if you go out of the game for more than 3 years or stay cocooned in your comfort zone doing repetitive tasks, your ability to keep-up with the rest in the talent race is going to be severely affected. Unless your learning rates (at 40 and beyond) are phenomenal, chances are you will feel like a fossil piece when you emerge out of your secure zone.
So what’s our strategy when it comes to staying abreast of all the change around us? If you aspire to lead, here is what helps. Identify new areas of growth within your current expertise and opt to work on these. Be part of cross-functional teams. Collaborate with those who are already working on break-through areas and innovative ventures and share their insights and know-how. Secondly, stay in tune – find resources that stir your mind, teach you new words, concepts and ideas. Pick a couple of emerging topics relevant to your current portfolio and leverage on today’s learning technologies such as webinars and web-conferencing to master them. Attend at least 2 knowledge transfer sessions a year – seminars, conferences or workshops and make industry connections. Thirdly, find experts who can provide relevance to things happening on the ground and follow them up via social media channels or other subscriptions. It helps to know what is happening at the frontiers today though you might not be there yet.
In fact, when it comes to filling up leadership positions, its not really how much you delivered in the past that people look for, its how much relevance you have to the future that matters, because those who hire know that this is the breed of people who embrace changes fast and will lead innovations within organizations. And that need not be a tall order. If the Malaysian facebook penetration rate is any indication, we know we are a bunch of fast-adopters. So the next time you contemplate moving on to newer and riskier areas of work, remind yourself that there isn’t a complexity that the human mind can’t conquer. The talent race is ON.