Start Your 2022 Career Planning for the Post COVID-19 World
Now is the time to start your 2022 Career Planning for the Post COVID-19 World. The world of work has changed so much in the last 18 months. Hopefully, you have woken up and started to re-evaluate what you are doing in your career and why.
Remote work is here to stay. What percentage of the workforce is allowed to stay working remote has yet to be determined but it will be significantly more than before the pandemic. Therefore, where do you want to live?
Change is accelerating and you need to be prepared for that change. Will you start experiments in 2022 that allow you to test new directions in your career?
If you are going to test new directions, what training or education will you initiate in the coming year? What skills do you need to acquire?
Disruptions in career paths and industries will continue for the foreseeable future. How are you going to track and adapt to those disruptions?
Most of us in the 2nd half of life have seen our social and business network change. Many of our generations have retired and left the workforce. Others have passed away. In-person networking has already started but are you ready to re-engage in those activities? What will be your networking strategies for the coming year?
Let’s tackle each topic in your 2022 career planning.
Remote Work is Here – Where Do You Want to Live?
I have been working remotely for years. For 40 years, I lived in Austin, TX and back in the middle part of the last decade, I started to question why am I still here. It was reading the book Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud, that got me thinking about this. The concept is that for new things to begin, we have to end old things. By the way, most of us suck at ending things.
We moved in June 2018 from Austin to Ajijic Mexico. We sold our condo in Austin in July of 2021 and bought a home in Ajijic in October of 2021. I can live anywhere I want, why not live in paradise.
Where do you want to live? If you can work remotely and live anywhere where would that be?
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I want you to put some thought into that career planning idea over the next few months!
What Experiments Will You Undertake in 2022?
I picked up this concept from the book Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration by Diane Wu-David. Diane discusses the concept of taking low-risk side projects to see if you enjoy them and would they be successful. The idea is to look at these as experiments. I discussed this further in my post Are You Ready to Future Proof Your Career? Learn to Experiment and Not Be Afraid.
In 2021, I have been teaching classes on Amava.com about becoming an expat. I have looked at this as a focus group as to whether I want to write a book on the topic. This has made me some money but more importantly, I have learned a lot about the market. I look at this as an experiment to see if there is a market for this topic.
What side project or experiment do you want to start in 2022 to see if you find it enjoyable and possibly lucrative?
What Skills Do You Need to Acquire in 2022?
We should all be lifelong learners. Learning does not stop when we left school. What skills do you need to acquire to stay current? What skills would you like to acquire for your personal growth?
The skills you need to acquire probably will keep you earning money. The skills you would like to acquire may have nothing to do with your career.
I will be spending the holiday downtime studying up on the topic of LinkedIn newsletters. The plan is to launch a LinkedIn newsletter strictly for the podcast in January and I want to understand how I can measure the results. I want to grow the podcast sufficiently in 2022 to garner the attention of sponsors.
On a personal note, I want to get better as a bicycle mechanic and will be studying YouTube videos on a variety of bicycle maintenance topics. I bought a new Trek road bicycle in December of 2020 and this has improved my overall health and cardiovascular system. I am now able to make a category 2 climb of about 7.5 miles in a reasonable amount of time.
Tracking Career and Industry Disruptions
What you initiate in 2022 you should continue for the rest of your career. The first thing I recommend is to set up some google searches that will help you monitor career and industry disruptions.
For example, you might try the following:
- Disruption in plug in your industry due to COVID-19
- Disruption in plug in your career path due to COVID-19
You will want to play with these and then generate some google alerts.
What Are Your Networking Plans for 2022
Are you willing to attend an in-person conference? How about online conferences? What about networking events?
At some point, the world will return to something that resembles normal social behavior. What exactly that will look like is beyond what I can predict. It will all depend on what you are willing to do.
I will be speaking at a financial conference in Austin at the end of April. My current plan is to attend a couple of different Encore career and podcasting conferences in 2022. I am looking forward to returning to conferences in that I have not been able to do this for the last 3 years. In 2018 and 2019, due to my visa status in Mexico, I only could drive back to the US from Mexico. The COVID-19 pandemic has shut everything else down since then. I will be putting a plan in place during December.
Framework for Career Planning
I hope this gives you a framework for how to go about career planning for the post-COVID-19 world. You should go through this process at the end of each year and tweak it as the world continues to change.
We will get to the other side of this pandemic but what that new normal will look like is still unclear.
What is your first step?
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