Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 1 of 15

Career Management
A how-to framework for advancing your professional career

1. Preamble

The initiative to write this paper was motivated by a presentation about Shell Brands
International AG that I was invited to give to the NEXUS-network of young employees of Shell
in Switzerland. A discussion about personal career development has inspired me to further think
about this topic. The result of this process is this paper which I am glad to deliver to you for your
perusal. Maybe this framework can help young employees to more systematically approach the
issue of career planning. The paper is not meant to solve the problem of planning a career but
rather to serve as a guideline to help to structure such thinking/planning or to stimulate reflection
about career management.

In developing such framework I have endeavored to apply and to adapt general management
theory to the theme of career management. The readers with business studies will recognize many
of the models used. I will therefore not explain in many details how these models work. If
interested the reader will find a more comprehensive discussion about the models in the literature
(see bibliography). In addition I have created a few own models that may help to illustrate and to
support career management. None of these own models have however been empirically tested
and shall therefore be considered as proposals only.

What is important is that you look at the framework in an integrated way. The models do work
together and influence each other as is illustrated by the generic strategy model (Figure 3).

The framework as a whole is the private work of the author therefore the responsibility for and
ownership of what is said in this paper solely remains with the author and with the authors cited.

I now invite you to discuss and to test my hypotheses. Maybe you will find the framework useful.

References:
E.g. (2.1.) makes reference to chapter 2.1.
Sources are referenced in the text and in full in the bibliography at the end of this paper.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 2 of 15

2. Hypotheses

2.1. Hypothesis 1

The more congruent the circle-surfaces of the “Needs-congruency-model” (Figure 1) are and the
more the needs are embedded in an ethical framework the higher will be the chances of a
successful career development and the greater will be your personal happiness. The “H” therefore
is “Happyland”.

Figure 1:

2.2. Hypothesis 2

Nobody but you yourself is responsible for your career development. Others can support or
hinder your advancement. These people are the stakeholders in your career development. (4.3.)
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 3 of 15

2.3. Hypothesis 3

Career management is dynamic and you will have to work through the “Career-management-
cycle” (Figure 2) many times during your professional lifetime in order to keep your career
moving up.

Figure 2:

3. From analysis to implementation

Systematic career management requires a strategy. It might therefore not be wrong to apply a
generic strategy model as a basis to structure thinking about career strategy development. Such a
generic model has e.g. been proposed by Johnson and Scholes; Pettigrew (1993; 1988 cited by
Boojihawan and Segal-Horn 2005, p.8), that is here used as a starting point. The boxes related to
each step of the strategy process (Analysing, Choosing, Implementing) propose what could be the
theme of your thinking and they make reference to chapters of this paper containing respective
models/tools and further information. The tools suggest a process that you can adopt in your
career strategy planning. Your own information gathering delivers the content and career strategy
development should be done in context of e.g. culture, your personal situation, and economic
situation. The sequence in which you reflect on the themes is less important but you should
conclude with an integrated view of the outcome of each step of the strategy process and later
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 4 of 15

appraise the result of the strategy process integrative as a whole. The numbers in the boxes of
figure 3 indicate the sections in the following text.

Figure 3:

4. Analyzing Phase

4.1. Aspirations and career objectives

Many people just dream. If you want to be successful with career planning it is helpful to get
clarity about what you really want and what you see as your personal objectives for your
professional life – long-term and short-term. Articulate the objectives in a measurable way. When
you do this do it in an inclusive manner i.e. consider what and who else is important? What
balance between work and private life do you want to achieve? What are the trade-offs you are
ready to accept? A short-term career objective could e.g. read: “In 3 years time: I want to be a
chief-accountant in a middle sized Swiss firm that operates globally. The number of subordinates
I coach is a minimum of four. My salary shall increase by 15% real in this period. I will earn a
degree as eidg dipl Controller. I am prepared to work hard but maximum 55 hours per week on
average (including study) and not on Sundays. I too want to keep my family and myself happy.
Every 12 months my wife and I will review where I stand.” How realistic is this objective? Is it
feasible, does it offer flexibility or is it calling for frustration? The framework presented in this
paper can contribute to find out.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 5 of 15

4.2. Inventory of resources and gaps

Figure 4 presents an example of how you could make an inventory of your “assets” (resources)
that have value in the job market and that can support your career. It is also advisable to think at
this early stage of the strategy process about what are the key gaps in your resource list compared
to what would be needed to reach your objectives. This discovery will direct your learning needs.
The resource list is an example only and can help you to find a format that supports your own
thinking process. Reflect about the items that you consider important in the context of your
situation, drop those that you consider unimportant, add others that you miss. The idea to classify
into tangible, intangible and human resources is borrowed from Grant (2002 cited by Bakhru
2005, p. 168) who has introduced this classification in his works about resource-based view of
corporate competitiveness. Maybe you find this segregation helpful too. Please note that most
important is to list your tangible results in former jobs. What have you achieved, what have you
changed, what has been the impact YOU have made (quantify and put it into context). Provide
evidence of your assets and use it e.g. in a job interview.

Figure 4:

A good tool for further feeding the above analysis is to perform a 360-degree feedback exercise.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 6 of 15

Robbins (2003, p. 30) stresses the importance of matching personality with jobs to increase
employee performance. He makes reference to the Myers-Briggs typology test that classifies
individuals into introvert or extrovert, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, perceiving or
judging. These polarities are then combined into 16 personality types. Answering Myers-Briggs
100 questions test may help you further in the analysis of your own personality and may impact
on your assessment of your resources. For more comprehensive information you may find it
useful to access http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk where you can find which personality types
suit which jobs. There are multiple approaches and tools to determine your own working style,
typology, preferences, and personality.

4.3. Influencer assessment

We have already touched upon this theme in hypothesis 2. Clearly people around you but maybe
also further away from you are influencing your career. A task of career management is to
identify and to assess the importance of the stakeholders. There are those stakeholders who could
help you, but there are also those who could potentially hinder your advancement. This is a theme
that is closely related to issues of power and politics. Examples of stakeholders in your career
might be: Your boss and your former bosses, your boss’s bosses and peers, your peers and
subordinates, the HR-departments (identify who), people you are working with, people from your
private networks (including family) etc. You need to brainstorm who your career stakeholders
are. The quality of the list (the influencing power of the stakeholders) and not so much the
number of people is important. Of course your career stakeholders will change during your
career.

Figure 5 is a model inspired by Mitchel, Agle, Wood (1997 cited by Moss 2004). It can help you
to assess the importance of individual stakeholders to your career development. I propose to
profile your stakeholders using the three attributes:

Power (P): Has the person terminal decision authority in the organization with regard to your
career (e.g. potentially your next boss)?
Legitimacy (L): Has the person formal authority to influence your career (e.g. members of
succession planning teams, assessment panel, former line manager)?
Utility (U): Has the person an own interest/benefit to influence your career?

In their model Mitchel et al. use “urgency” as one of the attributes. In the context of this paper
“utility” might be the more adequate attribute. The time criterion may come into play when you
decide how urgent it is to build relationship with specific stakeholders.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the power attribute has overriding importance. To reflect this in
your assessment I propose to weigh the stakeholders on each criterion from 1 (not strong) to 5
(very strong). The assessment of the importance (I) of each stakeholder can then be calculated
using these formula:

I = +P(L+U) to assess a stakeholder who promotes your career

I = -P(L+U) to assess a stakeholder who hinders your career.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 7 of 15

The result (I) of each calculation produces a ranking list of the impact each stakeholder may
have.

This done is now the base for developing strategies to manage career stakeholders. I will however
not explore how to do this in this paper.

Figure 5:

4.4. Competition in job markets

Part of your analysis will be to understand how much competition is in the market you would like
to participate in. This understanding may help you to design your development strategies (i.e.
should you choose to change job, industry, skill set to improve your competitiveness) and how
you can possibly differentiate yourself from your adversaries. Porter (1985) has contributed to the
school that the industry structure determines competition in an industry and hence its
attractiveness. For analyzing industry structure he has proposed the five competitive forces
determining industry profitability. His analytical model looks quite simple but it is not so easy to
seriously work through the 5-forces and to derive their dependencies. In figure 5 you see Porter’s
model changed for the purpose of using it in the context of this paper. A few very rudimentary
explanations:

- Bargaining power in a job market may generally be influenced by: Number of participants,
concentration, switching cost, differentiation etc.
- Threat of new entrants in a job market may generally be influenced by: Entry barriers such as
e.g. accreditation to a profession, legal requirements, capital & knowledge (or access to),
experience, government policy etc.
- Threat of substitutes in a job market may generally be influenced by: Willingness of buyers to
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 8 of 15

substitute human resources through technology, switching cost for outsourcing etc.
- Rivalry amongst candidates may generally be influenced by: Exit barriers (could job holders
easily work in another job/industry – general question of mobility of work force), supply and
demand for specific professional groups (e.g. MBA’s), diversity of candidates.

Figure 5:

You can find a more comprehensive but still short description of Porter’s original 5-forces model
at http://www.12manage.com/methods_porter_five_forces.html

5. Choosing Phase

5.1. Career objectives and interpersonal values

A key factor in your career planning is to get clarity about your short and longer-term career
objectives (4.1.). Critical is also what kind of personal relationship you value most. Coomber et
al. (2002 cited by Tyler 2004, p.170) list these six relationship values:
- Benevolence: Doing things for others.
- Conformity: Being accepted, doing what’s socially correct.
- Independence: Making decisions, getting your own way.
- Leadership: Being in charge, having power and authority.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 9 of 15

- Recognition: Being highly regarded and admired, having status, being important.
- Support: Being treated with understanding and consideration.

5.2. Generic development strategies

Model figure 6 addresses a further aspect when choosing a strategy. It deals with the question: Is
it better to develop own strengths further or should one concentrate on weaknesses reduction. The
model is pretty self-explanatory and is open for debate. Anecdotal evidence does suggest that the
combination “dislike-task” and “task requires capabilities where I am weak” has a high failure
potential. Hence a logical conclusion would be to think twice before you engage in the lower –
right “avoid-box”. But you will certainly face all situations of figure 6 during your career
journey.

Figure 6:

5.3. Positioning

Career strategy choices are dependent on where you stand today and where you want to go to. A
suggestion for thinking about it is to adopt the concept of positioning as is exemplary described
in figure 7. If you are e.g. a specialist working in a local environment but your vision is to move
to the opposite position three general directions (strategies) are open to you. It is unlikely that you
can perform the move in one go. More realistic is that you will approach your aspired position
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 10 of 15

stepwise (complementary to this model is the career pathway model figure 9).

Figure 7 shows the three generic strategies for achieving the aspired positions that are:

Strategy A: Remain in a local environment/business and develop generalist capabilities.

Strategy C: Remain with your specialist capabilities but transfer them in a more global
environment.

Strategy B: Is a combination of both. It envisages the end position directly. This strategy is in
tendency more challenging/risky as you will have to learn in two new fields: A new job in a new
environment. It could however be the “fast-track”.

Figure 7:
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 11 of 15

5.4. Employer – career matrix

When you are clear about your objectives, your resources and your gaps you are at a decision
point that is described by figure 8. This model will focus your thinking around where and through
what kind of job/exposure you can best capitalize from your resources and at the same time
moving forward with closing own resource gaps (i.e. learn and experience and grow). Decisive
will also be how far do your resources fulfill the needs of your organization/employer.

Figure 8:

5.5. Strategy testing

Before implementation, testing of your chosen strategy is recommended.

See 6.3. for further information.

6. Implementing phase

6.1. Career pathway

Implementing career development strategies means changing jobs and functions and implies
permanent learning. One approach to do this is to alternate deepening of capabilities and
knowledge with broadening capabilities and knowledge. This is illustrated in figure 9.
Example: Assuming that after leaving professional education that gave you a broad scope of
knowledge a first job is probably in a function in which only a small amount of what you have
studied can be applied. The objective is now to achieve a high degree of professionalism in this
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 12 of 15

specialist function. Your success is then a good recommendation to apply for broader oriented
jobs/functions and to develop new capabilities/skills.

Alternating specialist jobs with generalist jobs has proven to be a successful career ladder. As
higher in the hierarchy one moves up as more important becomes the generalist element. As more
senior your position becomes as more important are leadership, relationship building and
networking capabilities.

If you want to become a manager responsible for achieving results through people you clearly
need to concentrate to acquire the necessary leadership capabilities. A career pathway like e.g.
illustrated in figure 9 supports this. It shall provide opportunities to train each of the managerial
roles as described by Mintzberg (1973) and aggregated in: Interpersonal roles, information
processing roles, decision roles. More about Mintzberg’s 10 managerial roles can be found at
http://www.bola.biz/mintzberg/mintzberg2.html .

Different leadership qualities/capabilities are required depending on the level in the hierarchy.
Drotter and Ram (2001) describe the challenges at each of the six passages on a managers
pathway from managing self to managing others to managing managers to function manager to
business manager to group manager to CEO.

Figure 9:

The career development pathway is a journey of continuously integrating practice, learning and
theory for making a difference in how you learn, how you deliver the practical tasks and how you
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 13 of 15

use theory in your work and learning. It’s the ultimate aim of any professional career to make a
difference and by that to contribute to your self-development as well as to the well being of
society.

6.2. Market search, CV and interviews

There is a lot of specialized literature in this area. Therefore only a few remarks and
recommendations:

- Explore the internal and the external market in relation to your chosen strategy.
- If your company uses an internal Open Resourcing System: Program automatic notification of
job openings
- Build/maintain relationship with all your identified key stakeholders.
- Study job postings, understand in detail what is asked for and then develop a CV that makes
clear reference to the tasks and how you can make a difference to it. Be specific and different.
Most CV’s are too long, too general, boring to read and not different from each other. There is a
great chance to make a difference already in the application process.
- Interviews and assessments: Remain authentic.

6.3. Strategy checking and performance monitoring

Johnson and Scholes (2003 cited by Viney and Gleadle 2005, p. 126) propose a generic strategy-
testing framework along the criteria of suitability, feasibility, and acceptability. This concept
might be useful for periodically checking your own career development strategy.
- Suitability: You want to look at suitability for: achieving your objectives, complying with the
“congruency of needs” requirement (figure 1), closing your resource gaps (figure 4) etc.
- Feasibility: You want to look at feasibility with: resources you can deploy (figure 4), timeframe
you have set, the opportunities your employer can offer, situation in the job market (4.4.), your
own mobility etc.
- Acceptability: You want to look at acceptability for: your career stakeholders (4.3.), your
family, your organisation/employer, your own value system etc.

Strategy checking shall be performed before you finally choose your career development strategy
for implementation but periodically on your implementation journey.

Performance control means checking against your set of objectives (4.1.). You may also want to
use secondary measurements such as e.g. appraisal reports and feedback from your environment
for assessing performance of your career. Benchmarking your advancement with those of your
colleagues in the same company and with your alumni is a complementary possibility.
Benchmarking inherently bears the risk to cause frustration. As careers are also situation
dependent (7.) it can be more motivating to focus on comparing against the objectives you have
set for yourself and how you have developed as a person and professional.
Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 14 of 15

7. Closing remarks

Following contingency theory by Vroom (cited by 12manage) there is no single right way of
making career management decisions because successful career development is dependent on
various internal and external factors and is therefore influenced by the situational circumstances.
Therefore proper situation analysis and assessment of future developments is necessary if you
want to plan your career. Contrary to such an approach is a fatalistic view trusting that an
“invisible hand” will put everybody at the right place at the right time. Even a fatalistic approach
may produce a good career but in general the probability is lower than when you develop and
implement your own strategy.

The framework that has been presented here may look difficult to apply comprehensively. And
usually few have much spare time to invest in career planning. If it stresses you don’t do it. Take
the parts that you think are useful to you, adopt, adapt and change what suits your needs best.
However whenever you analyze and build a strategy an important thing to always ask is: What
does that mean, how could it impact on my career development, what can I learn from it? At the
end making a career is much about hardworking, tangible achievements, being flexible, liaison
management, developing leadership capabilities and (in managerial positions) generating results
through others, courage and understanding the culture of the organization as well as power and
politics. Your soft skills are therefore probably more important than your cognitive and tangible
assets. But it is also about having at least a sketch of a strategy and implementing it.
I wish you every success and fun in your career.

Written in Switzerland, July 16, 2006

How to cite this article:

Brodbeck, H., 2006. Career Management. A how-to framework for advancing your professional
career. [Online].
Available at https://strathclyde.academia.edu/HeinzBrodbeck

Author:
Dr. Heinz Brodbeck, has been a director with Royal Dutch Shell. Today, he is consulting
business organisations and volunteering within the Waldorf School movement and related
charities. He has studied business economics, marketing and communications management in
Switzerland and England and has earned a doctorate from Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK
for his research of internal marketing (Living the Brand) in sustainable banking. Available at
http://goo.gl/z9E0X .

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Heinz Brodbeck  Paper (draft): Career Management, July 16, 2006 Page 15 of 15

Drotter, S.J. and Ram, C. (2001) Building leadership at every level – a leadership pipeline, Ivey
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