I’ve been coaching engineers for a long time and the success of this can be see through the testimonials of people who’ve graduated from a program I run. While those I have helped have seen the light, I come across a whole range more of engineers who show quite irrational behaviors when it comes to their careers.
As part of the consults I have made available, I ask the question – what is your career objective? Where are you heading? And quite often the answer is that they are unsure of what to do. Or what they want to do is based on hearsay or a gut feel or what a few friends or family say or what their ego will dictate.
Your career is an asset pretty much like a house or a car you buy – probably worth more if you take the net present value of 40+ years of income generation from your career into account. (try that out – multiply your annual salary by 40 years, compound it and then compare that to the price of your house!).
Yet the amount of research done to improve this asset (career) is quite different to the house or car you’d acquire. With the house or car you’d never think of doing this on hearsay or emotion or based on less than full advice. You would rely on expert advice, right?
Yet how many people use experts to guide them through their career?
So that’s the first level of irrationality I see. Individuals hold objects like a house or a car on a different pedestal as compared to their career. Even though their career is worth much more than the price of a house and it affects self-esteem, increased salary prospects, the ability to leave the world a better place and to be more friendly at home.
On a different point, individuals go to a GP, get a health check and then spend money on specialist fees to get themselves better soon. They will spend money going to a fitness coach. Spend money on a dietician. Yet when it comes to the career, they want to spend nothing. They may spend on job related training and I don’t mean employer sponsored training which doesn’t address your needs. After all that sort of training addresses the employer’s needs. So training on things which don’t get them to where they feel truly happy from a work perspective with that being money not well spent. (if training was the be-all-and-do-all to career success, everyone would be happy just through training, but that’s not the case, is it?).
Individuals will spend money on everything else. Yet when it relates to something which gives them mental and emotional capital, like career coaching and job transitioning, especially through an expert, proven through those engineers using the expert’s advice and benefiting, they cannot see the similarity.
So this is the second level of irrationality I see. People will readily spend on various things which give them physical wellness but refuse to spend money on something which gives them emotional and spiritual wellness. Something which takes up a third of their life.
Why is there this irrationality when it comes to one’s career?
I’m frustrated by the number of people who show mental and emotional signs of distress when I talk to them during my initial consults, who refuse to take the coaching lifeline I extend to them. A life line which has helped others and has had a great success rate, as borne out by the various testimonials of those who have already transitioned through.
I want to help, as I feel for those individuals suffering poor self-esteem, broken marriages, heartache and suffering for years on end, in careers which fail to inspire and jobs which are on the cusp of disappearing.
Towards that I am offering a book I wrote specifically for engineers called The Work Trap Dilemma. This is a hard copy book, free to any engineer, which will help them learn what’s holding them back at work. I am also offering a free consult to any engineer and this is only for those based in Australia, who want an initial career health check.
For those engineers within Australia who are in jobs which are disappearing, or jobs which hold no promise in tomorrow’s world, or jobs which fail to inspire; and want to transition out of that, there is now an option to re-examine the work trap they are stuck in and think of Plan B’s and Cs around that.
Reading the book and taking the initial consult is the first step towards this.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/careers-why-we-so-irrational-ray-pavri/
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