Make Your Real Value Visible and Enhance Your Career

What does an enhanced career look like? Since careers are personal journeys, they look different for each one of us. Here are the many forms of an enhanced career.

• Jim didn't care to move into management, but he wanted to know what he did for the company had value. Through Meaningful Competence, Jim developed the ability to create and update Value-Added Outputs with each supervisor he worked for. The Value-Added Outputs provided the clear expectations and capability to view the value he produced to get the raises, bonuses, and recognition without requiring that move into management.

• After six years, Kristi was ready for a career move. She had an idea what she needed next. Using the Individual Mesh, she identified the competence she needed to build to move into the new career. By adjusting her Value-Added Outputs with her current employer, she built a record of results that supported her move into the new career.

• Kyle's timing was bad. Just when he was starting his career, the economy tanked. Kyle knew he needed more than have happy thoughts and work hard. He needed to know his real value to represent it when opportunity was given him. Each day he worked in the fast-food restaurant, he focused on achieving his Value-Added Outputs. The confidence he gained through visibly seeing his success propelled him into the law profession, aided by a scholarship and degree from a highly-rated university. He continues to set Value-Added Outputs and use the four levels for building competence to further his career. 

• Shardan didn't know what to say when he went home. As the manager of Design Engineers, he didn't do the work, just managed the people who did it. When his son asked what he did that day, the only response he could think of was, "I managed." One day he shared that thought with Kent. During a short discussion in which he told Kent how frustrated he was to hire engineers from the university only to lose them two years later, Kent identified that he wasn't losing them, they were being promoted mostly to jobs inside the company. That meant that he produced one of the most important Value-Added Outputs, a promotable employee. Shardan stayed in his position an additional four years producing promotable employees until he was promoted to produce more value for the company.

Value-Added Outputs provide the clarity needed to expose your real value and allow you to better target your career improvement efforts. A Value-Added Outputs is:

• Something you produce—a service, physical product, event, document, or other countable output—that is proven to influence Relevant Business Results. 

What do Value-Added Outputs look like? Here are a few.

Your career will influence your life. So it's important to enjoy your career. A good day on the job influences your enjoyment of the day when you're not working. It's a big deal.

Rather than try to find the most relevant advice in a large book or course, you're given several Career-Life Situations to choose from, each with a recommendation of how to use the Meaningful Competence strategy for that specific situation.

Here are some examples.