Controlling Your Work Life Balance
There’s something strange about your work-life balance. In so much that choosing the wrong career can have a positive or negative effect on how you live your life.
Whether you know it or not, consciously or unconsciously, what you do for a living has an impact on your life. This could be the result of choosing the wrong career choice, going into a career that YOU didn’t choose (others chose it for you), or you are at a place in your career that you’ve reached a glass ceiling (or you think).
The things that you know or don’t know are affecting your career. If you are in a situation where you need more training. Then go get it. Don’t sit around and wait for your employer to provide it for you. They very well may not. Especially, if it’s training for you to advance into a new position within the company or a new industry.
Why would they train you to leave? This is not a good ROI on their part. Therefore, you should take training into your own hands. Especially if it’s to advance to a new industry.
So how do you do this?
First, decide whether you want to stay in the same industry or not. Once this decision is made, then decide what else you don’t know and need to know to be eligible for new opportunities.
Remember, your skills can be outdated. And in today’s marketplace, they can be outdated very quickly. For example, just a few years ago, it was good to be proficient in Microsoft Word/Suite. Now, that’s a given. If you can not navigate through a basic word program, you are in real trouble.
So, you can improve your skills to other vocational skills such as coding, web design, instructional design (which is more than just making great powerpoint slides). Then there are timeless skills such as: writing, adult training and accounting.
Regardless, even with the timeless skills, there are things that need updated training on. In order to improve your chances of YOU controlling your life and how you plan to live it, YOU have to take charge of your own training.
This can be done many ways. I’ve written, “To Change You Might Need Training”, there are options for acquiring training.
Luckily, in today’s world, you can get the training on your own terms, and darn near free. You can learn a ton of things on YouTube, SlideShare and there are even MOOC classes that offer courses from well known universities, such as Stanford and Yale, and even universities from around the world.
The point is, if you do not like the way you are living, if you think you are working too hard and need a raise, and you know in order to do this you need training, then get what you need. Get the training and the, ‘Pivoting May Not Take As Long As You Think’ because the good thing about training. You can take it with you wherever you are planted. It’s yours.
While mastering additional skills, also work on your soft skills. These could be things as small as improving your team working skills. Read new research on you you can be an asset to your team.
Cross training is very important too. You can get training in this area, but not necessarily be an expert. For example, I’ve been an adult trainer, ran a non-profit and although I am an expert with the adult training, running the non-profit gave me skills in payroll, human resources and managing employees.
Although I got this exposure, I will say the human resources and managing employees was the most fun. Am I an expert at managing thousands of people. No. But I can manage 50–60, and I know enough about payroll to have a decent conversation with a payroll officer.
Do I want to do payroll again, NOPE! But this experience has provided me with the skills of understanding how basic payroll works.
At the end of the day, these are skills and experiences that I have learned that no one can take from me, and I learned at no cost. This training I received can be used across any industry and I got it on my own.
My background is in education. There is no way a school system would need to train me to do payroll. This is not in my scope of work in working with curriculum and instruction. Even when I wrote grants for schools, I handled budgets, but never had to do anything with payroll because they had their own departments for this.
You see, this experience I got in payroll, I got on my own. I was working in a school system teaching 7th grade English, when I got this experience. Getting experiences and training outside of work, if need be, is what will set you apart from others in your industry.
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Genola Johnson MY WHY: To help passionate people craft profitable professions with the foundations of their life’s purpose. She lives with her husband and two super model daughters in Atlanta. You can find her on GEBJohnson.com and her podcast The GEBJohnson Podcast. Follow her on Twitter@gebjohnson.com or IG gebjohnson
