INTHEBLACK December - January 2022 - Magazine - Page 14
STRATEGIC CAREER MOVES
Career journeys
AT A GLANCE
14
DEC 2022
JAN 2023
INTHEBLACK CAREER, ELEVATED SPECIAL EDITION
Career development
experts say the linear career
path concept is a myth
perpetuated by an emphasis
on career planning.
Focusing too much on
mapping out a long-term
career can mean opportunities
that arise from unexpected
career turns are missed.
Instead, it is important
to learn how to live with
uncertainty and not place too
much emphasis on setting
rigid targets.
STORY JOHANNA LEGGATT
FORKS IN
THE ROAD
From pandemics to career breaks, redundancies and lateral
moves, career journeys are anything but linear these days.
Like many highly skilled professionals,
Michelle Johns assumed she would steadily
climb the corporate ladder and eventually
arrive at the top job.
Johns set her sights on the role of
CFO, but the further she advanced in her
accounting career, the less she aspired to
join the C-suite.
“I began to realise that I wasn’t excited
by the notion of being a CFO,” she says.
“So, I started to apply for roles internally to
find out what else I was interested in and
that allowed me to take on a new project.”
One such new project involved helping
colleagues managing change, and it proved
to be a light bulb moment.
“I realised I loved helping people
navigate change within an organisation,
and I wanted to help people do this full
time,” she says.
Johns knew that she would struggle to
move from financial planning and analysis
management to change management
internally, so in 2014 she quit her job and
set up a change management consultancy.
“I didn’t have a lot of fear, but everyone
else was fearful for me, and they said how
brave I was,” she recalls.
“I didn’t see it as courage. I just knew
I had to do it, otherwise I would be
comfortable – yet unhappy – for the rest
of my career.”
UNPLANNED CAREER DISRUPTIONS
According to Jim Bright, organisational
psychologist and professor of career
development at Australian Catholic
University, the linear career path is a myth.
“The non-linearity of careers has been
around forever, but no one’s ever talked
about it, because there has been this
obsession with career planning and where
you’re going to be in five years’ time,” he says.
“But this kind of planning often fails
to appreciate all of the contingencies that
occur in people’s lives.”
