The Friday Few Observations for Week 31 of 2024 - Career Positioning 101 - It's time we All Went Back to School!

Summer isn’t over for another six weeks but with half the public schools in the country starting on Monday it sure feels like it.

We are chock full of content from some interesting meetings and conversations from July which we will look to drop into our publications a little at a time, but our lead story for you is about career positioning.

It would appear that AI is allowing all of us to do more with less help and if you make a living helping others it means that you might need to keep thinking about how you can continue to surprise and delight your clients with what they need next, think about the problem they are living with now and how you can solve that problem for them.

We were asked on several occasions essentially the same question by a wide age range of professionals.
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“How do I position myself for success in the new AI driven economy?”
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We drew up a quick sketch and have the following process as a potential path to coming up with some potential answers.

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Here are the actions to consider taking.
List out your intellectual assets which can be loosely defined as things you have some expertise in relative to the average person.
I might have some expertise in:

• Open Water Swimming
• Competitive Golf
• Running a Sales Team
• Leading a Company

List out your abilities that activate your assets relative to others.
I might have some ability to:

• Help an average swimmer learn how to complete their first open water swim
• Help a 9-handicap golfer become a 6 through course management
• Help a technical founder understand the right ways to manage salespeople
• Help a chairman of a company restructure a management team as an interim CEO amidst a crisis

List 3 industries that are growing quickly and list 3 people in each industry that are leaders

• Research what is driving the growth
• Analyze how each leader is positioned for success and their strengths
• Think about some potential gaps that might exist in areas that are not strengths

Contact the leaders you identified and offer to take them to lunch

• The context for the lunch is how you might be able to overlap their needs with your assets and abilities.
• When people are leading companies that are growing, they are always looking to level up the team they have.
• You want to earn the right to have them tell you what problem they are living with right now that they can’t solve.

Solving that problem is your pathway to maximizing your contribution to a successful company which in turn will increase the chances you earn a spot on that team.
Professional services has employed millions of people in the United States and paid for plenty of mortgages and college tuitions, but the puck is moving and it is time to understand how to reposition your unique assets and abilities to fill in gaps on fast moving companies vs being the last person working at the CVS store while the machines fill your prescription and everyone uses the self-checkout….