Quo Vadis Opinions

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Sean Mc Loughney’s new book, “slave to a job master of your career” has a nice catchy title and makes some excellent points. There’s a section on how to know when you are a slave to your job and a very good checklist to see when you have an “employee mindset” on page 12.
Chapter one is about managing your career the way you would manage your own business. You need to take responsibility for your own career and not expect your employer to lalways look after you.

Great advice which I give to all my clients. There’s a nice table on page 18 highlighting the entrepreneur mindset versus the employee mindset.
For example
“I’m passionate about my clients” versus “I do my job well”
Or
“I take pride in my appearance” versus “Sure I’m fine the way I am”
Or
“I earn my wages and give value for money” versus “They should pay me more for what I do”. 

Or
“I love to smile and bring energy to my workplace” versus “First thing I do is smile to get it over with”.
However I can’t agree with
“I love to wear bright colours” versus “I wear grey, that way I won’t stand out”.   This won’t work in some workplaces, for example if you work in an undertaker.
A business slant  runs throughout the book, which can be a little grating. For example- “build your business empire around delivering extraordinary results”.  But what if I don’t want a business empire, what if I just want to make a living and enjoy my job?

 There are interesting chapters on networking and developing your personal brand which would be useful to anyone developing a career. Unfortunately the business language will put off a lot of people not working in business, which is shame, because otherwise it’s well presented  and is a useful reference book, particularly for anyone at mid management  levels  wishing to develop their career further.

Disclosure
Sean is a Chartered Accountant as am I, and this book is published by Chartered Accountants Ireland, who are a client of mine, but I do not know Sean and am not being paid for this post.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Self Employment, Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.