TAKE A CAREER LEAP
How to Broaden Your Impact ... Without Leaving Your Classroom
By Kim Gould
When you chose your career as an educator,
you knew what you wanted. The satisfaction of watching
a youth devour math, or learn to express her ideas through art, or display
wonder at an experiment – these are the gratifying moments you dreamt
of then and the joys that keep you there today.
Educators have the pleasure of a career
that brings daily satisfaction. Nevertheless, you may also want to broaden
your circle of impact beyond the students of one school, or you may desire
variety outside of the typical classroom or office setting. Many educators
simply see needs to be met and more to do than can be done in a traditional
school.
You can shape your own future and enhance
your institution at the same time through an approach that develops your
effectiveness in your position and produces avenues for sharing and visibility
throughout the organization. This approach requires only thought, frank
scrutiny, and brainstorming. It presents a breakdown of four key factors
shaping your career and a straightforward analysis to help you devise
specific steps that will further develop the parts of your job known to
contribute to competence and advancement.
The key factors are visibility,
autonomy, relevance, and relationships. Use
the questions in the sidebar to see where you can invest your skills and
desires for career enhancement returns. You can quickly develop alternatives
for yourself that are practical and creative.
Leave no question unanswered! Then use
your answers to shape a plan that will impact the system while enhancing
your job promise, your work enjoyment, and your sense of accomplishment.
Even if the alternatives you put forward seem small or insignificant,
you are on the path to becoming your organization’s most important
asset.
| Questions
for Career Enhancement |
Visibility – the degree to which you and your work are
known in the organization.
- With whom in the institution have I shared
my ambitions, my goals? Who else could help me if they had more
such information about me?
- How is what I do communicated to the organization
(both informally and formally)? How can I improve on this? What
other avenues are available to me?
- Who are the influential people in my organization
who know about my work? What additional information could be shared
with them and how?
- Who are the influential people outside
my organization who know about my work? How could they learn more
about me?
- Which of my job activities bring me into
contact with people beyond my department? How can these activities
be expanded?
Autonomy – the amount of discretion in your job.
- What parts of my job allow me the opportunity
to act on my own initiative, to demonstrate my creativity? How
could I make these a more central part of my job?
- Are there any new projects or activities
in the organization or within my job that would give me the opportunity
to develop something? How could I get involved with these projects?
Relevance – the value of your job and actions to organizational
issues and problems.
- What are two to four crucial issues that
my institution faces within the next two years?
- What skills do I have that could play a
role in addressing these issues? How can I use these skills to
become more involved in these issues?
- What other skills could I develop or improve
on to make me more of an asset to the organization? How can I
do this?
Relationships – your supporters and associates on the
job.
- How often am I in contact with my peers?
How could I benefit more from these interactions?
- Which senior person(s) could best help
me do my job more effectively? What can I do to develop this relationship?
- What contacts, both inside and outside
of the institution, do I have that are of most value to the organization?
How can I use these to their greatest value?
- What contacts could I develop that would
make me more of an asset to the organization?
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Kim Gould is PREL’s Director of
Human Resources.
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