How to succeed in a professional mobility within your company?
3 December 2012
Read by 2377 persons
Changing jobs may be a common experience, but it often generates anxiety or, conversely, illusions among employees. Marc Traverson, a professional coach, offers his advice on how to prepare.
[Express yourself] French society is not one that highly values professional mobility. However, for the past twenty years, there has been a greater frequency of career changes. They are even a necessity to hope for advancement within most companies.
The success of mobility requires a good articulation between the company's stakes - managing talent and skills - and those of the employee. The transition is a "common" experience, in the sense that every working person will experience several significant changes in their employment conditions during their career. And yet a job change is never anecdotal for the person who is faced with it, because it has consequences on their daily life as much as on their career prospects.
No turning back possible
These periods are always experienced intensely, because professional change confronts us with uncertainty. This can generate anxiety or, conversely, excitement about new things, and sometimes magical expectations, illusions. It is also a period of solitude, since career choices ultimately depend on the free will of each individual. Finally, these are irreversible decisions, since there is generally no turning back possible.
Undertaking a professional transition means experiencing a change of status, role, and sometimes profession. It means leaving a familiar team to go to new colleagues. This involves familiarizing oneself with a different culture and work environment, new ways of communicating. In a willingly anxiogenic economic environment, which focuses attention on risks, it is a psychological moment characterized by questions about oneself, one's security, and future prospects.
The desire for mobility takes various forms. Some spontaneously express a desire for novelty, evolution, a new challenge. Others express more of a feeling of boredom, weariness in their activity, or even a rejection of their current situation. They then manifest, rather than a positive aspiration (a "going towards"), a willingness to move away (from a boss, a team where a conflict has developed, a profession they are tired of, an organization where they do not see a future). The desire to change then appears motivated by a feeling of deadlock or lack of recognition.
Take the time to take stock, to understand what happened
When, for one reason or another, one leaves a position under difficult circumstances, or when professional relationships have deteriorated, it is useful to take the time to take stock, to understand what happened, and to close relationships with former colleagues: transmit what needs to be transmitted, send a message to the team one is leaving. This relational work is very important to be fully available and able to adapt to a new position.
Change can activate stress scenarios: a tendency towards over-adaptation (I conform to what I imagine is expected of me), ambivalent attitudes (I say I want this position but I do everything to prevent it from happening), victim scenarios ("anyway, I won't succeed" or "why did so-and-so get the position, and not me"). It is true that the position of "candidate" is not easy to hold, and involves narcissistic risks: finding oneself in competition with other candidates for a coveted position, being "judged" on one's abilities, attitude, behavior, risking not being chosen, and experiencing it as a personal rejection.
Moments of confusion are frequently observed when making career choices. One is not sure what one wants or does not want, to the point of sometimes feeling paralyzed by this feeling. Or one doubts one's ability to fill a position, unable to assess one's own abilities - this is sometimes called "imposter syndrome".
Identify what gives us pleasure in work
In all cases, it is advisable to project oneself towards new objectives, in connection with the skills one wishes to develop. A good compass for orientation is to identify what gives us pleasure in work.
It is recommended to use all the means available to the company - career assessment, coaching, HR advice - to take a step back from one's career, to reconnect with forgotten or buried skills, one's deep motivations, one's ability to learn and adapt.
Relationships with personal and professional circles - managers, colleagues, HR managers, and of course close friends, family, and friends - are crucial. It is indeed through exchanges that the professional project takes shape, through successive adjustments. Confrontation with other points of view gives the candidate a clearer vision of their strengths, their motivations, the opportunities of a future position and their ability to fill it.
Use all available levers, seize all opportunities
This reflection often leads to modifying one's relationship to work, to questioning one's own commitment. Hence the importance for any company attentive to its "employer brand" to know how to conduct successful mobility. This is not a cosmetic issue, but a strategic one: the way in which transitions are actually supported will echo, in a systemic register, the values claimed by management in the conduct of the organization.
This is, in essence, the central question for any employee faced with the desire, or the necessity, to change. It involves using all available levers, seizing all opportunities, without losing sight of the essential: the pleasure and interest of work, the meaning one finds in it.
Marc Traverson.
Lexpress.fr
Posted online on December 3, 2012.
[Express yourself] French society is not one that highly values professional mobility. However, for the past twenty years, there has been a greater frequency of career changes. They are even a necessity to hope for advancement within most companies.
The success of mobility requires a good articulation between the company's stakes - managing talent and skills - and those of the employee. The transition is a "common" experience, in the sense that every working person will experience several significant changes in their employment conditions during their career. And yet a job change is never anecdotal for the person who is faced with it, because it has consequences on their daily life as much as on their career prospects.
No turning back possible
These periods are always experienced intensely, because professional change confronts us with uncertainty. This can generate anxiety or, conversely, excitement about new things, and sometimes magical expectations, illusions. It is also a period of solitude, since career choices ultimately depend on the free will of each individual. Finally, these are irreversible decisions, since there is generally no turning back possible.
Undertaking a professional transition means experiencing a change of status, role, and sometimes profession. It means leaving a familiar team to go to new colleagues. This involves familiarizing oneself with a different culture and work environment, new ways of communicating. In a willingly anxiogenic economic environment, which focuses attention on risks, it is a psychological moment characterized by questions about oneself, one's security, and future prospects.
The desire for mobility takes various forms. Some spontaneously express a desire for novelty, evolution, a new challenge. Others express more of a feeling of boredom, weariness in their activity, or even a rejection of their current situation. They then manifest, rather than a positive aspiration (a "going towards"), a willingness to move away (from a boss, a team where a conflict has developed, a profession they are tired of, an organization where they do not see a future). The desire to change then appears motivated by a feeling of deadlock or lack of recognition.
Take the time to take stock, to understand what happened
When, for one reason or another, one leaves a position under difficult circumstances, or when professional relationships have deteriorated, it is useful to take the time to take stock, to understand what happened, and to close relationships with former colleagues: transmit what needs to be transmitted, send a message to the team one is leaving. This relational work is very important to be fully available and able to adapt to a new position.
Change can activate stress scenarios: a tendency towards over-adaptation (I conform to what I imagine is expected of me), ambivalent attitudes (I say I want this position but I do everything to prevent it from happening), victim scenarios ("anyway, I won't succeed" or "why did so-and-so get the position, and not me"). It is true that the position of "candidate" is not easy to hold, and involves narcissistic risks: finding oneself in competition with other candidates for a coveted position, being "judged" on one's abilities, attitude, behavior, risking not being chosen, and experiencing it as a personal rejection.
Moments of confusion are frequently observed when making career choices. One is not sure what one wants or does not want, to the point of sometimes feeling paralyzed by this feeling. Or one doubts one's ability to fill a position, unable to assess one's own abilities - this is sometimes called "imposter syndrome".
Identify what gives us pleasure in work
In all cases, it is advisable to project oneself towards new objectives, in connection with the skills one wishes to develop. A good compass for orientation is to identify what gives us pleasure in work.
It is recommended to use all the means available to the company - career assessment, coaching, HR advice - to take a step back from one's career, to reconnect with forgotten or buried skills, one's deep motivations, one's ability to learn and adapt.
Relationships with personal and professional circles - managers, colleagues, HR managers, and of course close friends, family, and friends - are crucial. It is indeed through exchanges that the professional project takes shape, through successive adjustments. Confrontation with other points of view gives the candidate a clearer vision of their strengths, their motivations, the opportunities of a future position and their ability to fill it.
Use all available levers, seize all opportunities
This reflection often leads to modifying one's relationship to work, to questioning one's own commitment. Hence the importance for any company attentive to its "employer brand" to know how to conduct successful mobility. This is not a cosmetic issue, but a strategic one: the way in which transitions are actually supported will echo, in a systemic register, the values claimed by management in the conduct of the organization.
This is, in essence, the central question for any employee faced with the desire, or the necessity, to change. It involves using all available levers, seizing all opportunities, without losing sight of the essential: the pleasure and interest of work, the meaning one finds in it.
Marc Traverson.
Lexpress.fr
Posted online on December 3, 2012.
