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Today’s Professional Woman Report: Career Success Is A Moving Target

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Today’s Professional Woman ReportYesterday, Citi and LinkedIn released the results of their fourth annual survey “Today’s Professional Woman Report“.

This year’s survey was conducted among a sample of more than 1000 professional women and men, and -like every year- it was inspired by discussions on Citi’s LinkedIn Group “Connect: Professional Women’s Network“.

The results indicate that career satisfaction is a moving target and the definition of career success is changing. See the infographic below for details.

The key finding of this study is that career success doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, as most professionals believe that their career will peak in the next 2 to 20 years (depending on their current age), but the happiest point in their career was several years ago.

On the question about when they think their career will peak, most professional women replied at the age of 53, while men expect to reach the peak at the age of 55.

Grouping by generation, Millennials expect to reach the top at the age of 43 and their happiest point was at the age of 28. Baby Boomers on the other hand, believe their career peak will be at 62, while their happiest moment was at 49.

Here’s what Linda Descano, CFA®, President and CEO of Women & Co., said about these results: “The survey illustrates that career satisfaction and success are not just end goals – they’re both moving targets.”

On another note, while only a 17% defined career progress as a salary increase, 58% of men and 52% of women equal career satisfaction with a “good salary”. – For women it was equally important to doing what they love and being challenged.

Furthermore, women were asked a series of questions about their financial and career concerns. The good news is that financial issues are less of a concern for women this year. Compared to Today’s Professional Woman Report of 2013, the number of women who were concerned with paying off student loans has dropped from 46% to 35%, with saving for retirement from 56% to 46%, and with paying off credit card debt from 35% to 30%.

When they were asked what the most significant indicator of women’s progress in the workplace would be, 1/3 said “elimination of the gender wage gap”. Men replied “the end of the need for the ‘women in the workplace’ conversation”, and 31% of women agreed.

On achieving goals, 37% of women said they achieved their professional goals this year and 84% of the ones who asked for a raise last year, received it.

 

What do you value most to feel satisfied with your career?

 

Today’s Professional Woman Report Infographic:
Today's Professional Woman Report, June 2014Infographic source: Women & Co. blog
Data source: Press Release

 

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Does Blogging Help You Stand Out From The Pack?

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IBlogging Can Help Your Career Successf you’re looking for a new job, or a new career, one of the suggestions career experts like myself offer is: LinkedIn. Recruitment consultants crawl round LinkedIn like truffle hogs in an oak-wood, and LinkedIn provides an opportunity to showcase your sills and expertise to both speculative enquirers and those with a more serious interest.

In a recent blog post, Tony Restell proposes that, rather than relying on LinkedIn, job-seekers should concentrate their energies on blogging. In his view, LinkedIn doesn’t enable the recruiter to distinguish genuinely good candidates from poor ones. A blog helps you stand out from the pack.

To a large extent I agree with him, but there are a couple of areas where you need to be cautious: consistency and connection.

Consistency and Connection

As far as consistency is concerned, once you’ve started, you need to keep going. If your blogging schedule is inconsistent, particularly if there are large gaps between posts, you may look disorganised, or lacking in focus.

In terms of connection, how will people find your blog? Of course, you can mention it on your LinkedIn profile, and tell your friends on Facebook, but ideally you want to have a range of strategies for encouraging people to come and visit

So, if you are thinking of going down the blog route, what ‘s the best strategy?

Here are some questions to consider before you ever embark on a blogging approach for career success.

  • What do you want to achieve with your blog? Is it simply a new job, or are you in this for the long haul? Do you want to become an acknowledged expert in your field, or are you content to operate in the void?
  • How much time, energy and money do you want to spend on creating and maintaining your blog? This will depend on what resources you have available, and what image you want to project.
  • What help do you NEED in setting up and maintaining your blog? I have an IT background, including IT security, and at first I set up my blogs myself. However, I’ve come unstuck on a couple of occasions, and I’ve finally realised that I was not put on this planet to get down and dirty with the innermost secrets of WordPress.
  • Even if you have a strong technical bent, how are you with the written word? Most mainstream recruiters will be put off by typos or poor grammar.

There are plenty of ways to set up a blog cheaply and cheerfully  with relatively little technical knowledge – for example by using blogger, wordpress.com (this is different from wordpress.org, which I am using) or one of the other free platforms. You can also do video blogs using Youtube. But these might not project the image you want, or give you maximum control of your site.

So, if you want to stand out from the pack, blog by all means, but do it in a strategic way to ensure you achieve your goals.

If you need help with finding your career direction, or help with using a blog as part of your plan to stand out from the pack, then contact The Career Success Doctor for a complimentary Career Quickstart Conversation.