The Academy Of Business Strategy - Qualifications And Experience

We all undertake academic qualifications for a variety of different reasons. Perhaps our choice of degree in university was dictated by what we felt we excelled with in high school, or what we felt interested in at that particular time. We may have progressed towards completing a Masters degree in the same subject for the same reasons. We are also influenced by peer pressure of course. Most people who have aspirations of working in a senior capacity within a commercial organization will undertake an MBA at some stage in their careers. After all, everyone else has one! Perhaps our choice of professional qualifications was dictated by our employers in that they were ensuring that we had the skills necessary to excel in the position where we were employed. The majority of professional qualifications are specific and unique to the organizations that promote them and while always useful will probably have little relevance should the employee leave to work within another organization, even if the new employer is from the same industry. It is always obvious when you review a CV to determine whether the individual in question has ever developed a career management strategy, because the educational and professional qualifications will follow a clearly defined pattern which has inevitably been pre-determined. It is always easy to identify the specific time within the individual's career when this career management strategy started being implemented. You can say the same about experience. In many cases there does not appear to be much correlation between an individual's academic and professional qualifications and the positions where they have been employed. Some CVs suggest that the individual is over qualified for the positions in which they have been employed. In other cases CVs suggest that an individual is under qualified for the positions in which they have been employed. Once again employment positions tell us a lot about an individual. An employee who has been employed within the same position for 5 years without promotion has either already achieved their career ambitions or does not have a career management strategy in place. Alternatively an employee who changes their position with increasing regularity without promotion clearly still does not have a career management strategy in place. Those individuals who do have a career management strategy in place have CVs which appear to follow a pre-determined agenda which is dictated by the individual and not by the organizations which they have worked for. Position changes are influenced only by promotion and the positions chosen follow a clear strategic path. All successful people implement career management strategies for life. The best football or tennis players start implementing their career management strategies when they are young children, or their ambitious parents will do it for them. In many cases these parents may not have quite achieved what they set out to personally within their own careers and have reached a stage where they now realize just how important a career management strategy would have been. They subsequently then implement these plans for their children so that they do not make the same mistakes. The same can be said of politicians and business people. Good career management strategies start as early as possible and are sustained for as long as possible. But it is still always better to start later on than never to start at all. Many individuals believe that success is mostly down to chance, being in the right place at the right time for example, but it is possible to strategically place yourself in the right place at the right time given the right knowledge and resources. Luck plays an important part in all of our lives but success is not dependent upon luck alone. If this were true then we would all have an equal opportunity to achieve anything that we wanted to without any effort or hard work. This is not unfortunately the case of course. The sad fact of the matter is that those individuals that do have career management strategies, do not really work any harder, or put in any more effort, than anyone else in order to achieve their career goals. Their efforts and hard work are simply more relevant and productive because everything is pre-determined, well planned and well managed. Those without career management strategies invariably work just as hard and are just as dedicated, but their efforts can all be in vain because there is no real direction and the individual is not ultimately in control of the direction which they are taking.