Many people plan to become a technical director after the age of 30 and earn millions of dollars a year. However, after the age of 30, you may face layoffs, can not find a job, or unemployment.
When you are doing the same job as your colleagues, including interns, what are your strengths and why do you become cTO?
What else can you do when you’re not young anymore?
Yang Yi is the chief consultant of “coaching” career planning at the first workplace network.
What is the most agonizing and sensitive age in the workplace?
About thirty-five
Being 35 means you’re likely to receive “age inappropriate” rejection letters when applying for a job.
Being 35 means that even at a big company like Huawei, you are at risk of being liquidated;
Turning 35 means that even if you don’t need a thermos, the midlife crisis is already with you…
But I also want to tell you that 35 doesn’t mean the end of your career prospects. It depends on how you spend your life before you turn 35.
Today I share with you an article by Yang Yi, a senior career planning consultant, who reveals the key to breaking the 35-year-old dilemma based on his years of consulting experience.
It’s a bit longer, but it’s worth reading, no matter how close you are to 35.
Whether you admit it or not, you have to take the 35-year-old phenomenon seriously
Many enterprises specify the age below 35 when recruiting talents. If you’re 35 and you’re still hopping jobs by sending resumes to job boards, you might want to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong.
Of course, according to our practical consulting experience, if you really think about this problem at the age of 35 or older, there is a good chance that you are unable to solve the problem, a lot of practical difficulties will make you powerless, helpless.
To keep your career from going to hell in a hand basket after 35, you should set clear goals by at least 30 and have five years to catch up.
This may be the last best time for you to grow. Missed this opportunity, you are no longer young, the society will not be tolerant to forgive your young frivolous. Otherwise, you take one more step wrong road, will be bound to make up for it with ten times the cost in the future.
Age 30: Three big problems you’ll have to face
First, can you support your family and responsibilities?
If you have a family and a career, you need to be clear about how your career can evolve to ensure that you can support your family. This includes not only your spouse, but also your children and parents (especially if both of you are only children, you are responsible for the support of four elderly people on both sides).
At this stage, your stress levels have multiplied, but if your growth in the workplace has not multiplied, or is in some form regressing, you will face more stress in your career. And this pressure, more often than not, leaves you with no power to pursue better development.
When a lot of people are job-hopping, they often have a big concern: if I jump, the income is not now high, so, the current job, I will easily move again?
** So, if you want to act, do it now. ** Packing light and moving forward as hard as you can while you don’t have a family on your back is your only option. Do not enjoy comfort at this time, otherwise, you will always be in the rest of life in the mediocre “comfort” down.
Second, are your abilities age-appropriate?
One of the trickier situations in many of our clients is the mismatch between ability and age. Many people who work for three or five years, or even one year, don’t have much difference in ability, so when they want to move up the career ladder, they will encounter a lot of resistance.
There are two reasons for this:
One is frequent job-hopping, no accumulation in one direction, no skills;
Second, despite long-term accumulation in the same direction, growth was achieved only in the first year, and the remaining years were just repetitive work and treading water.
So for those of you in your 30s, here’s a question you need to carefully examine from now on: How many years have I been working since graduation? Are my abilities appropriate for my age?
If it doesn’t, then it’s important to build up your sense of crisis early and run ahead to bridge the gap with those who anticipate it and make sure you don’t get knocked off your horse in the race.
Third, have you built and improved knowledge structures?
In the workplace, people at different levels do different things, and they have different perspectives and thinking patterns.
A basic salesman, thinking about how to maintain the terminal, this is the tactical level of things, but also his responsibility; But if a marketing director such a role, and the salesman every day thinking about how to deal with the terminal boss, that is his dereliction of duty.
The operation of every enterprise is composed of strategy and tactics. Big strategies will be subdivided into small strategies, and small strategies will be subdivided into execution tactics one by one, which will be put into practice by the grassroots personnel. People at different levels are responsible for different levels of work, which is also the significance of teamwork.
Similarly, ** Each person at different levels also has a different knowledge structure. The higher the hierarchy, the higher your perspective and thinking will be, and the higher your overall level of knowledge structure will be. ** Otherwise, your ability can only stay in the specific grassroots operation level forever, there will be no big development, the position is not likely to rise.
Before 30: How to build a foundation
I suggest you do two things.
First, find a goal that you can work towards for five, 10 or more years.
This is an ideal state of affairs. With a clear goal, your career growth can be centered around a point where you can accumulate experience, and this accumulation of experience over a long period of time can also be used as a bargaining chip for promotions and raises in the future. Experience is not necessarily related to ability, but without experience, there is little chance that you can improve your ability.
In his book Outliers, Macolm Gladwell says that if you survey the best athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, and scientists, they all rose to prominence after at least a decade of hard work of at least three hours a day.
There is a story in the book:
Maxim Vengrove was born in Siberia, where he was gifted with his first violin at the age of four.
And his talent is in direct proportion to his dedication. He practiced seven hours a day, gave a recital at the age of five, won an international award at 15, and became the world’s top violinist at 34.
“My mother would come home at 8 p.m., eat dinner and teach me the violin until 4 a.m. It was torture for a four-year-old, but two years later I became a violinist.”
A lot of people are complaining about the lack of opportunity. Not really.
Frank Fredi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, believes that people who effectively invest a lot of time in practice naturally have their own luck: “They work almost relentlessly, and when luck comes, they are ready.”
If you don’t get an opportunity, don’t complain, ask yourself: what are you not prepared for?
In our experience, if you stay in one direction for at least 5 years, you are likely to be rewarded, and the rewards will have a relatively long-term impact on your career. At the same time, it is the accumulation of such a long time, so that your foundation is very solid and firm, your steps will stand more stable.
The second big thing I suggest you consider is learning how to be a human being.
I even think it is a hundred times more important to be a man than to do things. Finding a suitable career goal may not be easy for many confused people. But learning to be a human being is a professional quality that you can develop at any company, at any time.
There are four elements of personal development that can have a fatal impact on your career:
1. Your interpersonal skills
This includes relationships with your boss, as well as relationships with your co-workers.
2. The ability to keep learning
I once had a client who was in his late 40s, had been an accountant for 14 years, and was still in a supervisory position with no promotion in the company and no raise for years.
We asked him, “Have you had any training, refresher, or any other kind of recharge in those 14 years?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
This is a very extreme example, but it’s very common in the workplace.
Without learning, your career is stuck in the same place. You think you are not regressive, but in fact others are making progress, the gap between you and others was pulled open imperceptibly, be equal to regressive.
3. Develop professionalism
Whether you have a goal or not, whether you want to do the work or not, as long as you are in the job, you should do it well.
Even if you don’t like the job, don’t treat it in a negative way. You’re not only wasting the company’s time, you’re wasting your time.
There are two things you can expect from being in the workplace: reward and growth. In the absence of a clear goal, do the best you can with what you have in front of you, and strive for everything you can get in this position. With a negative attitude to work, you will get nothing.
4. Be mentally strong
Many of the people I meet are vulnerable inside, unable to withstand the hardships that fall on their long life path. You know, everyone’s growth is not smooth sailing. Even Jesus did not suffer the baptism of suffering?
A strong heart can make a person see hope in despair, while pessimism will only make you miss the opportunity in front of hope.
There’s a line from The Shawshank Redemption:
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. A strong man can save himself, a great man can save another.”
You have no ability to become a saint, but must become a strong.
After 30: How to achieve a qualitative breakthrough?
Here are three things that are crucial to taking your post-35 career to the next five years when you’re 30:
NO.1
Complete your professional brand building
Kenichi Ohmae, the “father of Japanese strategy”, put forward the following view in Professionalism:
“Why do you win? In the future, it is competition among individuals that will move the world. Can it dominate the world stage and forge core competitiveness that others cannot surpass? The only thing you can rely on is professionalism.”
Are you a top business person or just an office worker? That’s the difference! Give yourself a professional positioning, establish their own brand image, will be your future career development to increase more valuable chips.
In order to support your “professional” brand image, you need to do two things:
The first is the knowledge structure mentioned above.
Move away from the specifics of the operation and set your sights higher and higher. Be a visionary rather than a short-sighted person.
Look up to the best in your field and aim for them as an example of your own growth. Step by step, bridge the gap. At this time, on-the-job learning, further study and so on need to be put on the agenda, learn to enrich their minds with new knowledge.
Second, it is to establish their own influence in the industry.
If you want to be a good professional, you must also look up to the best, establish your influence in the industry, and influence others with your ideas.
We met a great guy last year and he’s been very impressed.
He is a printing professional college students, after graduation to the printing factory to do sales. It is such a seemingly insignificant position, but he has built his influence in his own unique way.
He set himself a goal: to write an article every month for the most influential magazine in the industry. Of course, not every article will be publishable quality, but it must be written once a month.
The benefits of doing this are, first, building your influence in the industry; Second, it allows you to form your own knowledge structure.
NO.2
Make yourself a good middle manager
Stepping into a management role is a key step in your career growth. The future development space is inseparable from this promotion. But this position is not for everyone.
Gallup once did a survey, and found that the reason why basic employees leave so frequently is often not the company’s problem, but the boss: the company’s middle management.
It is precisely because of the poor middle management that the development and growth of subordinates are adversely affected, leading to their career development, no matter in professional ability or professional accomplishment, can not get effective growth.
You must realize that your management may change the life of your subordinates. It is your wrong management style that unknowingly hurts your subordinates and forces them to leave the company.
When your growth is being held back by your boss, it’s your misfortune. You can vote with your feet. When you become a manager one day, we don’t want to pass that misfortune on.
NO.3
Find a growing company and grow with it
This is a matter of great importance.
First, you can witness the growth of a company from small to large, from weak to strong, and gain a deeper understanding of the operation of the company. You can also feel the position and role of your role in the growth of the company.
Second, as the company grows, your value will have more scope and be more easily displayed.
While it’s understandable that many people tend to look for big companies when they’re looking for a job, looking for a smaller, growing company is a better way to grow fast. As you grow, the need for talent will be greater and you will be promoted faster.
Third, your loyalty will bring more returns for your development.
Enterprise choose and employ persons, one of the most important is loyalty. Especially in the case of high turnover rate and turnover rate in many enterprises, loyalty has become a very valuable professional spirit.
✎ ✎ ✎
No matter you are now “30”, or is “30” on the way, please always warn yourself: don’t waste your good time, seize all the time to seize, for their life more accumulation of some thickness.
To end this article with one of my favorite Jobs quotes:
You can’t do too many things in your life, so do everything brilliantly.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
