This win-win logic holds true as long as you happen to work for that company. That’s exactly where the free-agent era comes into play. If you treat your resume like a marketing brochure, you’ve already learned the first lesson of free agency. The second lesson is one that all today’s professional athletes have learned: You have to check in with the market regularly to get a reliable sense of your brand’s value. You don’t have to look for a job in order to get a job interview. For that matter, you don’t even have to have an actual job interview to get useful, critical feedback.
The real question is: How is your brand doing? Form your own “user group” — the personal brand equivalent of a software review group. Demand — insist on — honest, helpful feedback about your performance, your growth, your vietnam mobile database value. It’s the only way to know your value on the open market. It’s the only way to ensure a strong negotiating position when free agency is announced. It’s not disloyalty to “them”; it’s responsible brand stewardship for “You” — and it creates credibility for them, too.
It’s over. No more verticals. No more ladders. That’s no longer how careers work. Out is linearity. A career is now a chessboard. A maze, even. It’s full of sideways moves, forward moves, diagonal slides, and even backward moves when it makes sense. It often does. A career is a series of projects that teach you new skills, gain new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your community of colleagues, and continually reshape you as a brand.