Curate Career Advisors

27 November 2017

Your boss, mentors, work colleagues, friends, loved ones, online sources, these articles?

You are likely to have a myriad of sources that feed into your thinking, and into the goals and aspirations you have about your career.  Over time these sources accumulate and multiply.  Not all (including this blog) are ones that are useful for your circumstances.  In fact, many sources of career advice can be confusing, contradictory, biased, inappropriate for your circumstances, be of a generic nature, full of platitudes and just plain wrong. 

Family struggle to divorce their own needs from the advice they give, online/book advice is by definition nonspecific in nature, your boss is most interested in the good for the organisaton/team.

Every now and then it is a good idea to look critically at the sources giving you career advice and as much as possible eliminate, stop listening to and tune out from the ones that don’t help you make proactive, meaningful and courageous career decisions.

Here are 3 questions to use to curate the sources you pay attention to for career advice:

• Does the source have my best interests at heart?
• Do I admire the way this person has approached their career?
• Is there evidence (rather than hearsay) to support their advice?

The other way to use these questions is to turn them back on the career advice you give yourself.  So often we are our own worst career advisors, not believing in ourselves, not stretching ourselves just that little bit, listening to our limiting beliefs and failing to celebrate our successes.  Critically examine the advice your give yourself too.

Happy curating.

As always wishing you a flourishing career.

Katherine