March 15, 2006
Advancing Your Career – What Works?
I think that we are so concerned about assisting people to get jobs (or getting jobs for ourselves) that we forget about the importance of getting promoted in the jobs that we land.
I think this lack of promotion difficulty is particularly evident in non-governmental jobs. Speaking for myself, I have never been promoted in any of the jobs I have held, meaning my promotions were accomplished by changing jobs.
So, I would welcome hearing from those of you who have been promoted.
How did your promotion happen?
What did you do to make it happen?
What did others do to support you?
Have you been promoted to a management position where part of your responsibilities involved supervising others? What is that like?
You can take a stab at just one of these questions, a couple of them or all of them and be as brief or as long as you like.
Thanks.
Peter
Posted by Peter Altschul at 10:07 AM | Comments (5)
March 01, 2006
Breaking Into “Non-traditional" Workplace Settings
Peter Altschul, guest blogger on the eSight Networking Forum during March, writes:
- "I have spent the bulk of my professional life working in 'non-traditional work settings' -- meaning that I have worked in environments that most blind people (particularly totally blind folks) have not experienced. Since 1992, I have always been the only blind person in the organization that employed me, and almost all of my work has been in the non-disability realm.
- "I would welcome hearing from others with similar experiences…"
For the last 14 years, Peter has consulted with corporations, non-profit organizations, and coalitions about such areas as enhancing employer effectiveness at recruiting and retaining talent from under-represented populations, preventing teen pregnancy, and assisting school districts to use technology more productively.
He is an experienced change facilitator and educator with expertise in staff development, strategic planning, conflict/diversity management, and process redesign.
For more detail about how Peter approaches career management, go to the article, “Close Trust Gap, Advance Employment With Joint Training.”
Also check Peter's resume.
Peter’s query about non–traditional work settings reminded me of the “Quote of the Week” we ran in eSight’s NetWork News last week. It was from Nick Corcodilos of asktheheadhunter.com.
Nick maintains:
- "People are happiest in jobs that they discover for themselves, based on their own interests, because those are the jobs that are self-rewarding. The more you like your work, the more you will invest in your skills, and abilities and that will build your motivation and confidence. When you have smarts, motivation, and confidence, you will also be persistent. You will excel and you will survive any catastrophe. There are no bromides; there is only the keen awareness of personal choices. Listen to what others tell you, and you're doomed because you may ‘arrive’ somewhere high up the ladder, but you'll have no idea what you're doing there."
Those of us with disabilities sometimes find ourselves climbing out of two pitfalls.
Because much of our time is often devoted to correcting and overcoming our vulnerabilities or compensating for them, we often neglect cultivating our strengths and promoting them effectively to prospective employers.
Because those professionals who seek to help us often steer us into “safe,” easier-to-get jobs traditionally staffed by individuals with a visual impairment, our real interests and skills are sometimes shuffled aside.
And those of us with disabilities often walk a tightrope.
If we drift too far toward aggressively seeking accommodations that we know can be helpful in compensating for our weaknesses, we can appear to be “troublemakers” or “whiners” to non-disabled others.
If we religiously cultivate our strengths and find our niche in the right interest area (as described by Nick in his quote), we can easily become an “overachiever” (a “super crip”) in the eyes of others.
My proposition is that we can avoid the pitfalls and get off the tightrope by building a network of authentic contacts, individuals who have grown beyond stereotypical thinking about disability and have something worthwhile to say about when, where and how to get jobs which are compatible with our interests and skills.
Those in the “Internet” generation with visual impairments may be among the first to declare freedom from both the twin pitfalls and the tightrope. I think Peter would agree with me on that.
By finding that freedom; avoiding those who lead us (however unintentionally) into “traditional,” safe jobs for individuals with visual impairments; and cultivating a network of mainstream contacts, we can build meaningful, fulfilling careers.
Given the importance of cultivating mainstream contacts in that career-building effort, here is our discussion question for this week:
- What do you recommend as the best place to find
contacts who can help you build a meaningful, non-
traditional career when you have a disability?
Posted by Peter Altschul at 11:19 AM | Comments (9)