In the popular comic strip Dilbert, the title character says “All jobs require you to do things you’d rather not do. That’s why they have to pay you.”
The reality, of course, is that searching for the absolutely perfect job is likely a fruitless pursuit.
But with a heavy dose of common (or not-so-common) sense and strategy, it’s clearly possible to be successful in managing your career.
That’s the promise of Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career.
The three authors have themselves devoted their own careers to studying how other people can make the most of theirs. Ethan Bernstein is a professor at the Harvard Business School, Michael Horn teaches at Harvard and is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, and Robert Moesta is an innovator, professor, and research fellow at the Christensen Institute.
Moesta sat down for a visit to explore issues related to people’s career management.
In today’s workplace, what seem to be the most common forces that motivate people to quit their jobs?
In examining data from more than 1,000 people who had switched jobs, Moesta and his colleagues found 30 forces that caused people to quit. “Fourteen of these were pushes—meaning there was something not right about their current job,” Moesta says, and 16 were pulls—meaning that there was something alluring in another opportunity. We then clustered those to understand how these forces typically move together, which produced four most common sets of reasons that cause people to leave their job—what we call get out, regain control, regain alignment, and take the next step.”
Moesta says when people know it’s time to change jobs, two big forces tend to hold them back—the habits of their current job and anxieties about what a future role might actually be like. “People tell me all the time, ‘Oh I’d love a new job, but my commute is so amazing right now. I just can’t imagine giving that up for anything,’” he says. “To me this means they’re not actually ready to change jobs. They’re not ready to make a tradeoff that will be required to get something new. For anxieties—you see that in the job market right now.”
According to Gallup, Moesta notes, the highest number of individuals in the past decade are actively looking for their next job, “but they aren’t handing in their letters of resignation because it’s taking longer and longer to find their next thing. They don’t want to give up the bird in hand for something that’s uncertain.”
Moesta and his co-authors say job switchers should “hire their jobs.”
“This is counterintuitive to a lot of folks, but it starts from a theory I co-created with Clay Christensen [the famed academic and business consultant who developed the theory of “disruptive innovation”] called the Jobs to Be Done theory,” Moesta says. “The basic premise is that people don’t hire products or services for their own sake. They instead hire them to make progress in their lives. I’ve used that insight to build more than 3,500 successful products and services over the past several decades. And what we realized is that the same thing is true for individuals. Just like employees hire people, people also hire companies. They get to choose what work they’ll do in exchange for pay, benefits, a title and so forth to make progress in their life. They have more agency and choice than they generally realize in what they ultimately do.”
So what are the key questions people should ask themselves before embarking on a job search? Moesta suggests several:
- What’s the progress I’m trying to make right now?
- What am I struggling with?
- What do I want to go do?
- What things drive and drain my energy?
- What are my capabilities?
- What am I not good at—or I don’t want to do?
Moesta and his colleagues say a “career balance sheet” can help professionals gain clarity on their marketable capabilities.
“Just like companies have assets and liabilities, so too do people,” he says. “Assets are your skills, experiences, and capabilities. But just like assets on a company’s balance sheet, they depreciate over time. This is really important to understand. You may have a great network for sales, but if you don’t keep investing in that network, it’ll go stale over time. It has a useful shelf life if you leave it be. Same is true if you’re say an expert coder or something. So what the career balance sheet does is help make the capabilities you have clear to you. It makes it clear what their useful shelf life is in the real world. And then it makes clear what are the liabilities you’d have to incur to keep them current—or to develop new ones. Those liabilities are the time and money you’d have to invest to keep your capabilities fresh. That’s important because while we might all say ‘Gee, I want to learn three languages,’ most of us don’t do that because of the time and effort it would take. This helps us have a sober understanding of what our capabilities actually are and how they will be valued in the future.”
Next: Why ‘Try Before You Buy’ Can Be A Smart Way To Select Your Next Job