While many employees and organizations are finding value and opportunity in remote or hybrid work, one area of work that seems to be of concern is around career development. As we evolve our ways of working and work policies, many of the traditional actions and ways we relied on career growth and development are not as prevalent when you aren’t in the office. And many employees are starting to wonder if they’ll be able to develop and grow their career in the same way as they could when they were in the office.
Take this excerpt from this NY Times article from March 2022:
“Companies have become more open to remote work during the pandemic. Now, as they plan for what work will look like going forward, they’re paying more attention to what it means to build a career without the traditional opportunities for networking, mentorship and visibility that come with a full-time physical office. Some of their employees are also giving more thought to what long-term remote or hybrid work might mean for their futures.
“We’re beginning to hear from employees, in particular young employees who are — believe it or not — concerned,” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., chief executive officer, SHRM.”
Unfortunately, some research done prior to COVID-19 justifies these concerns.
The U.K. government found that those who worked from home were less than half as likely to get promoted than all other employees between 2012 and 2017. They were also 38% less likely on average to receive a bonus.
While early in career professionals are concerned, they are not the only ones who are worried about the potential missed opportunities for assignments, stretch projects, relationship building, and advancement that come with being present in the office. According to research from Bamboo HR, 53% of remote workers said they felt like they had to put in my work to prove their worth to their company.
Whether you’re trying to demonstrate the impact of your work, or looking for ways to develop and grow, the ways in which we do those things we traditionally equate to being easier when you are present. “Face-time” with your manager to review the outputs of your most recent project is easier when they sit next to you, or running into that potential mentor or sponsor who could help you navigate an internal transfer when you run into them in the dining hall feels more natural to many of us when we are all physically in the same place.
And if you’re a professional like myself, who started off their career in a professional services job that prioritized late nights and tight turnarounds, sometimes simply being in the office till the late hours of the evening gave you an opportunity to take on a workstream or stretch assignment that led to a big break.
But lest we forget, companies and organizations were not exactly great at providing opportunities for career development and growth prior to the prevalence of remote work spured by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2018, Gartner reported that 40% of employees who left a job did so because there was a lack of career development opportunities. Furthermore, LHH Penna found that 33% of managers said that they did not track their employees’ career development plans.
Taking Ownership Of Your Career Development
As an individual employee, you don’t have a ton of control over the workplace policies that are designed. And while you can and should prioritize working for a company that aligns with your goals and values however they are, there is only so much that is within your control. So what is there to do, when you have your own aspirations for career development and growth, but aren’t sure how to do so when you’re working remotely or in a company that has not invested in it?
As my friend and author Andy Storch likes to say, “you own your career.” And while this may seem like a catchy phrase, taking this to heart and focusing on what you can control about your own career advancement is the clearest path to achieving the career growth that you desire for yourself.
#1)Proactively Put it Front and Center
A small but powerful way to make career development front and center is to design mini habits in your workflow so that you literally can’t ignore it. For example, a former colleague of mine who was deeply invested in their career put a section on their shared google doc t with their manager that specifically tracked their career development plan, that way, each time they had a 1:1 it literally couldn’t be ignored. In another example, I recently worked with a manager, who had all of her employees at the beginning of each quarter, schedule a 1:1 with her specifically focused on career development, and nothing else. Since it was on the calendar, it got done.
#2)Record Your Work and Share it With Others
Hard work and good work is not enough. If nobody sees your work or if you aren’t visible, it’s a lot harder to be able to get exposure and opportunities for those stretch projects, chances for mentorship, and learning. One way to increase your visibility and surface area for serendipitous opportunities that advance your career is to begin documenting and sharing your work. I call this practice internal marketing, but it’s essentially summarizing your work and sharing it so that others can see it, benefit from it, and help you increase visibility.
#3)Facilitate Serendipitous Opportunities With Others
So much has been made about the lack of connection and serendipitous opportunities that come from being in the office, such as the proverbial “water cooler” moments, or being in the break room with your peers. While I do think those are hard to replicate, a benefit of the virtual work is the scale and connection you can have with people regardless of their geography because of technology like Zoom, Slack, etc. However, creating this serendipity rarely happens on its own, it requires a facilitator. The dictionary defines facilitator as “a person or thing that makes an action or process easy or easier.”
By taking on this role, you can help others, while helping yourself. Whether it’s bringing a bunch of people together to meet to discuss a particular topic, convening cross-functional stakeholders together to reflect on a project that you finished, or setting up a 1: many Q&A with a leader within your organization these are all examples of how you can start to find those moments of serendipity through facilitation. This helps you, in that you can build relationships and connect with others, but it also helps you in the sense that by helping others, other people will want to help you.
#4) Intentionally Make Space to Reflect and Review Your Career Growth
Oftentimes, we equate career development or growth is “doing and executing.” In order for us to grow, we must do something. While that is true, a critical part of career development is thinking, and reflecting. By creating time and space on a regular basis to reflect back on what you’ve done, and review for how you want to keep going is critical to ensuring that your ambitions align with the actions you are taking.
In our always-on world with lots of distractions, simply taking time each quarter to block out the noise, review and reflect, can help us focus on this. One way to do this is to write a “Career 10-Q” or a quarterly review of your career growth and development for that quarter. You can then share that with your manager and talk about how to keep furthering your growth and development
#5) Find or Build Your Community
After interviewing thousands of people about their careers, I found that one of the most common threads throughout all of these individuals is that the ones who believed they were successful were also the ones who relied on the help and support of others. The most successful people seemed to understand that career development is meant to be a team sport, not an individual one.
In an op-ed Reid Hoffman, the Founder of LinkedIn penned for the Wall Street Journal, Hoffman wrote: “We should recognize instead that individual career success depends on both our personal capabilities and our networks’ ability to magnify them.”
Going out and finding your own community of peers, colleagues or other people to connect with, learn from, and learn with helps you find opportunities, build skills, and develop relationships that can fuel your career development. While all of this can be done in person, there is a lot of opportunity, thanks to social networks and the internet, to do this online as well. Finding your tribe and looking for your community is your acknowledgement that you exist in a world that is much bigger than yourself, and any of your own personal aspirations.
Connecting with others and finding these communities allows you to connect to that outside world, and fuel your own growth through new ideas, information and people. Whether that’s by joining a formal Employee Resource Group within your company, or putting together a quarterly get together of other people in your same role at your company to connect and meet, finding others you can talk to about your own development and growth, fuels your connection to your career, but also to others.
Conclusion
Like anything related to the workplace, we have the tools, technologies and insight to do many things, but we have to do so with design and intention. The same holds true for developing your career when working remotely. It may not be the same, it may require more work, but it can still be done.
Finally, regardless of whether you are in-person or remote, the most important thing you can do as an individual employee is to commit and follow through with taking ownership of your career by creating time and space to work on it. Athletes, musicians, artists are all examples of workers who spend time off the field so they can be better on the field. Unfortunately, most of us desk workers do the opposite. Take a lesson from your favorite performer, and find some time to work on your game through career development today!