Build Your Own Ladder
eBook - ePub

Build Your Own Ladder

Tony Zeiss

Share book
  1. 178 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Build Your Own Ladder

Tony Zeiss

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

The average person in today's workforce will change jobs seven to nine times throughout his or her career. What's more, he or she will change occupational fields three to four times! Navigating this ever-changing landscape can be tough if you're not equipped with the best tools and information available.

In Build Your Own Ladder, Dr. Tony Zeiss lays the groundwork for a successful career. Being a self-made man and "CEO of the Year" himself, Zeiss passes on his wisdom of how to harness the four key areas needed to makea run-of-the-mill job into the career of a lifetime:

  • The power of a clear vision
  • The importance of positive thinking
  • The value of becoming influential
  • Investment in the lives of other people

With the growing labor and skills shortage, there has never been a better time for launching a great career! Don't let others limit you, don't let circumstances limit you, and don't limit yourself. Apply the principles in this book, and you will dramatically increase your chances of building your own solid career ladder and achieving your dreams.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Build Your Own Ladder an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Build Your Own Ladder by Tony Zeiss in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Persönliche Entwicklung & Karriere. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Thomas Nelson
Year
2010
ISBN
9781418526054
|1|
PREPARE FOR UNENDING CAREER SUCCESS
Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.
—Anonymous
THE CURRENT WORLD OF WORK
There has never been a better time to establish the career of your dreams!
America is in the beginning stages of the greatest labor and skills shortage of its history. Labor economists predict that we will experience a shortage of more than 10 million workers by 2011. 1 Further, a serious lack of skilled workers in all careers began in 2005 and will extend to an estimated shortage of 21 million workers by 2020. The shortages will be most acute among those in management and high-technology careers.2Baby boomers are retiring by the hundreds of thousands, and employers are eager to replace them with skilled workers.
Technological advances are opening entirely new career options no one dreamed of even a few years ago. Bioinformatics, geospatial technology, hydrogen fuel cell technology, and similar high-tech career options are providing broader career options for today’s workers. These are most exciting times for emerging workers who wish to establish personal career plans and for those who are already in the workforce and wish to navigate these workplace changes successfully.
The U.S. Department of Labor publishes a list of the fastest-growing occupations that may be of interest as you consider your career goal. They primarily include health care, automotive technology, construction, and computer software professions. There are emerging occupations in technology, and the demand for teachers and security professionals is growing rapidly. You can access this information at http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab3.htm. If you are a young person, I urge you to talk with your parents and older people about how to advance in a career, but don’t expect them to help you choose a high-tech career field. Most of these jobs weren’t around even five years ago.
With few exceptions, today’s workers are outlasting the lives of their companies. The days of dedicating one’s total working life to one organization are generally gone. Today’s workers will likely work forty-five years, change jobs seven or more times, and change career fields three or four times. Smart people are preparing themselves with the knowledge and skills to be competitive in the marketplace today and in the future. They see learning as a lifelong endeavor, and they keep pace with changing technology and changing businesses. In effect, they see themselves as individual enterprises. When one customer (employer) no longer needs their services, they shop for another one.
Today’s workers will likely work forty-five years, change jobs seven or more times, and change career fields three or four times.
You do not exist just to make money! A career should be fun and provide meaning to your life. If your current career doesn’t supply these things, it’s time to change careers. If you are just now entering the workforce, resolve to think this way from the beginning. There are plenty of exciting opportunities for anyone who has the ability to set a career vision, develop a plan, and work the plan.
Think about it. Your career options are almost innumerable if you prepare yourself with the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in the marketplace. Your chances for achieving a pinnacle experience in your career will be much improved if you also learn to harness the power of vision and thought, learn to be influential, and use the principle of reciprocity.
The choice is up to you. The human potential is awesome. Excepting certain physical limitations, you can become anything you choose and believe you can become. You may be thinking you are too old to start over. This is nonsense. Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame was in his late sixties when he began that business. Grandma Moses achieved artistic fame in her seventies. As President of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was privileged to award a ninety-year-young great-grandmother her high school diploma last year. These people refused to limit themselves.
You may also be thinking that you’re too young to be what you really want to be. Consider Michael Dell or Bill Gates, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two Stanford University graduate students who invented Google. Knowledge is more important than age. Besides, you won’t always be young. The question is whether you will grow older in the career you want, or just grow older.
Knowledge is more important than age. Besides, you won’t always be young. The question is whether you will grow older in the career you want, or just grow older.
Perhaps you think that you don’t have the intelligence to attain the career of your dreams because your college entrance scores were low or you didn’t do well in school. Guess what? The greatest predictor of career success is not your IQ or the grades you made in high school. I have been in education for thirty-five years, and I can verify that the most reliable predictor of career success is the ability to set a personal career vision and be willing to work toward achieving it.
It is time to seize the day! The time to expand your vision, drop the thoughts that limit your growth, and claim the career of your dreams is now, this moment. Let’s get started with a plan that will work for you. But first you must understand what it is all about. After all, you will spend most of your life working, and it is vital to give some serious thought about your options, your career goal, and the development of a plan for ensuring success.
A ROAD MAP FOR CAREER SUCCESS
At age seventeen I determined to become a teacher. At age twenty-two I set the goal of becoming a college president. When I turned twenty-six, I decided to also become a significant writer and speaker about education and workforce development. I was fortunate that my father taught me how to set goals and pursue them. I have achieved these major career goals because I first learned to set them.
TRY TO BECOME LIKE THOSE YOU MOST ADMIRE
I recommend that you try to find a mentor, preferably someone who is accomplished in your chosen career field, to give you the benefit of his or her experience. If you can’t find a mentor, look for people whom you admire in your career field, and observe them whenever possible. You will be surprised what you can learn. My first mentor was Dr. Isaac Beckes, president of Vincennes University back in the early seventies. He did not know he was my mentor, but I came to admire him so much that he became a vicarious mentor. I observed how he handled people and how he dealt with challenges, and I still emulate some of his behaviors today.
In my thirty-five-year career I have taught at the high school level, at the community college level, and at the university level. I have enjoyed a wonderful career, especially for the past twenty years as a community college president. I am currently privileged to lead Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. This fine college serves more than seventy thousand students each year through six campuses and a large online operation. When I was twenty-two years old I set the goal to become a community college president by age forty-four. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of people, just as Dr. Beckes was doing. It was an ambitious goal for a young man who was the first in his family of eight children to attend college and who supported himself financially. But I was able to overcome the doubts and fears that plagued me, and I set the goal. From that point forward, I thought of myself as one who was becoming a community college president.
Since that time, I have been an observer of people and their careers, and I have contributed to the research regarding workforce and career development. The collective knowledge from years of research in the field and the experience of helping hundreds of people mold stellar careers have helped me develop a guaranteed career-success formula. Setting the career goal is the major first step, but you have to have a plan as your road map for success. This formula will work for people who employ it and customize it for themselves.
The collective knowledge from years of research in the field and the experience of helping hundreds of people mold stellar careers have helped me develop a guaranteed career-success formula.
Those who achieve their highest dreams of career success learn to use the following:
1. The power of vision
2. The power of thought
3. The power of influence
4. The power of reciprocity
Each of these concepts will be thoroughly addressed in the succeeding chapters. Before any of these career-enhancing properties can be useful, however, you must have the physical capability and the burning desire to succeed.
BE PHYSICALLY FIT
If you take care of your body, your body will take care of you. If you abuse your body, it will become a liability as you attempt to achieve career success. We all know how important our automobiles have become. We generally can’t get to work without them. We’ve learned to take care of our automobiles by keeping them well serviced. The same is true of our bodies. If we don’t maintain them well, they won’t be able to serve us well.
Working in a career for an average of forty-five years requires physical stamina. Don’t choose a career that is a mismatch for your body. If you would love to play professional football, but weigh 120 pounds, you might consider a different career you could love. To achieve greatness in a career, you generally must work at it for two or three decades. Your body has to be able to get you through those years with a minimum of problems. You know that a healthy diet and exercise are essential to your well-being. If you hope to be a giant in your career, a good diet and regular exercise must become part of your life’s balance.
People Treat You As They See You
Your appearance can be your best asset or your worst liability as you climb up the career ladder. First impressions are critical, and you will always be making first impressions. Early in my career, I couldn’t afford a large wardrobe, but I made sure my clothes were clean and well pressed, and I kept my body trim and my hair combed. My wife gave me a book on dressing for success and encouraged me to smile more often. It was difficult for me to smile since my teeth were crooked, and I was painfully aware of that imperfection. I smiled anyway, and it helped. At forty years of age, I finally had the money and the courage to get braces, and my smile got even broader!
People treat you as they perceive you. This is a simple fact of life. Teenagers are often heard to exclaim that someone has judged them unfairly because of their outlandish dress, hairdos, or body piercing. If someone is screaming for attention through his appearance, how could the observer not draw a conclusion that he is insecure? People the world over process information and draw conclusions about others by their appearance and their behavior. This is human nature, which has not changed throughout history and will likely never change much. Everyone looks at himself in the mirror before going for a job interview, but successful career seekers assess their appearance before going to work each day. They understand the importance of packaging.
Your dress, hygiene, breath, posture, grooming, body language, facial expressions, and speech contribute to your ability to make and keep good impressions. A smart professional displays an attitude of alertness, vitality, and confidence on a consistent basis, including informal times when people observe you without your knowledge. You will be wise to pay attention to the dress and behavior of the leaders in your company and your career field. The accepted or expected dress and behavior of leaders in your career field are part of the culture of the organization and usually the profession. The more your dress and behavior conform to the established culture, the more likely you will be viewed favorably.
HAVE A BURNING DESIRE
If necessity is the mother of invention, desire is the mother of action. We can dream of happiness, fame, and prosperity, but if we don’t take action to achieve these things, it is only a dream. Almost all people have dreams of great careers, but relatively few actually reach them. Why? They fail to plan for that great career, or they fail to execute their plan. They allow circumstances to serve as their excuse. The most common excuses include lack of time, being too busy with children, and not having enough resources to seek and obtain the needed training or degree. All of these excuses can be plausible at times, but not all of the time. The root of the problem is the lack of desire.
One of my favorite student success stories involves a young, single father of two who had a burning desire to begin a career in the graphic arts field. He had the odds stacked against him. Kevin and his children were living with his mother, a ninety-minute drive from our college. He worked part-time, but still could hardly make ends meet. He had plenty of good reasons for not even starting on a career path. Nevertheless, Kevin felt that burning desire to prepare for a career in his chosen field. He applied for and received federal financial aid and enrolled in classes. He drove his very-used car to school every weekday for two years. It was his desire tha...

Table of contents