By Ian R. Mackintosh
Many books on the market teach specific management training skills. This book is not intended to teach you how to gain or develop those skills. And be aware that some of those skills can be taught, some can be gained experientially, and some are simply innate. Regardless of the state of your skill set, this book will show you how to assess your skills and formulate an effective plan for your career development.
Now that you know what this book will and will not do, let’s examine how it will fulfill its promised intentions. In a nutshell, it will show you how to target management positions, assess the skills you need in order to optimize your candidacy, target only the skills needed to improve, and develop a personalized plan to effect the necessary improvements. End result: getting the job you seek!
Similarly, you also can apply these principles to self-employment, entrepreneurship, and/or personal development, if you wish. This book primarily will focus on career development, but feel free to extend the principles presented to assist you in any area of personal development that resonates for you. Only you know what your current goals and objectives are, and so you are the best person to perform your assessment and plan. Whatever your goals and objectives might be, above all, remember that good management always leads to lasting success, so assessing your management skills and designing your plan to best utilize them can only improve your effectiveness in both your career and your personal life.
Throughout, I will emphasize and reemphasize key points. Please indulge me in this, as my intention is not to be repetitive or redundant, but rather to ensure that you remain mindful of those principles that I have seen lead to success, time and time again. With that said, let me reemphasize the personalized plan. This book offers a unique process suited to your needs. Once you honestly complete the skills assessment, you can customize this book’s advice to help you effectively attain your goals. Best of all, you can use the book multiple times throughout your career, whenever you feel the need to further develop your skills in order to seek a more attractive position. Indeed, even if you only use this book to expand your awareness of and insight into skills possessed by well-developed managers, you can benefit significantly. By choosing to invest in your development and awareness at any level, you improve your marketability and value.
How to Stand Out in Today’s Ultra-Competitive Job Market
Competition for management jobs continues to intensify with each passing year. If you are betting your financial welfare on your next management position and subsequent promotions, you now will need to be much better prepared to capture those increasingly scarce opportunities than you previously might have realized.
In a global economy, not only are professional jobs dispersed domestically and around the world, but inevitably, so is the management of those positions. This does not bode well for us as managers seeking enhanced opportunities within our own communities. We already see job compression at the lowest levels, where increasingly competitive situations in many industries mean that even very competent graduates sometimes now struggle to find initial footings in their chosen fields. The swelling ranks of globally accessible well-qualified professionals mean that this compression feeds up through to the highest levels of the management chain. Those coveted top positions that were always difficult to secure have become both fewer and harder to capture.
In all likelihood, you are already aware of these dynamics. How, then, can you best prepare yourself for career opportunities? In the past, it might have been enough in an expanding industry to just show up and do your job well. You would be “patted on the back” for your achievements and then could expect reasonable promotions throughout your career as your company grew. This is really no longer the case. Industries are more mature now, which results in their often experiencing slowed growth and associated reduced expansion opportunities. And that means greater job competition. Compounding this, equally qualified coworkers abound. As a result, previously available management positions are lost because they are also often geographically dispersed in order to take advantage of other local markets and labor, as well as offshoring. You clearly cannot rely on such a random process for your own advancement in such a competitive environment. How, then, do you beat the system so you can maximize your opportunities and excel in your field? The answer must be by maximizing the value you offer.
Key Points to Remember
Developing an understanding of your specific self-development needs is the purpose of this book. It also will provide you with a simple and effective listing, insight, awareness, and basic description of those foundational management skills needed. This then will enable you to quickly prioritize and determine where you must focus your own development, because you will be aware of your current mastery, adequacy, and deficiency in all key areas. With this plan in hand, you then can determine how to gain/develop the skills you lack while simultaneously making the most of the skills you do have, so that you don’t lose or waste precious time.
Excerpt from “Empower Your Inner Manager” by Ian R. Mackintosh.To order a copy of this book, click here.
Ian R. Mackintosh has more than 30 years of management experience, which serve as the basis for the principles and recommendations that this book offers. Mackintosh’s mission in writing this book is to help managers of all levels effectively optimize their careers—and to help people effect personal growth/development in life and business. He is the founder, chairman, and president of OCP-IP and has served on the boards of various groups. Since 1980, he has held senior management positions with National Semiconductor, VLSI Technology (now NXP), PMC-Sierra, Mentor Graphics, and several start-up companies. He holds a Master of Science in Microelectronics from Southampton University, England. For more information, visit www.empoweryourinnermanager.com
