Career awareness is something I talk about—a lot—in my book, Power Moves.
Before we explain what career awareness is, let’s talk about what it's not. Career awareness is not simply falling into a certain career and winging it from there. It’s not navigating your career with a blindfold—and allowing others to make your most important career decisions for you.
Career awareness—and a Power Moves approach—begins with asking yourself a few important questions,
- “How do I want to manage my career?”
- “What are my strengths?”
- “What specific knowledge do I own?”
- “How can my life experiences feed into long-term career success and fulfillment?”
Rather than waiting for a well-deserved promotion to come your way or letting your time at a company simply “run its course,” career awareness is actively staying awake for the drive—and steering the car of your own career.
So, What is Career Awareness?
Career awareness describes your career attitudes, your knowledge, and your life’s experiences. Career awareness is using all of these considerations when making active decisions about your career.
Your level of career awareness will directly influence how important and impactful the Power Moves you make will be. Let's talk more about how I identified and took charge of my own career awareness—and how we can all use it today.
My Career Awareness Mistakes
About a decade ago, my career awareness was neither well-developed nor well-informed. I didn’t know about the various common career traps I would face—or that my vision of the perfect “dream job” was limiting me in an extreme way.
Instead, my awareness was rooted in the chase for accomplishments, milestones, and strict adherence to a list of expectations that didn’t serve me. Instead of aligning my career awareness with my beliefs, my skills, and my overall attitude, I was aligning it with an Instagram-friendly picture of what success could look like to an outside world. It took me a while to realize that I was incredibly unfulfilled and constantly wanting more.
At the time, I mistakenly thought I had a great career awareness. However, my goals and expectations were rooted only in perceptions of success and accomplishment.
How I (Finally) Built My Own Career Awareness
It can be tricky to separate outward-facing success to inward-facing fulfillment. However, it’s crucial to tap into your career awareness in order to achieve a career that’s on your terms.
To build my own career awareness, I went a little backward. Instead of looking inward, I looked to other women. Whether or not they knew, they taught me about my own career awareness. When I began Career Contessa in 2013, I began to collect any career advice I could get my hands on. Whether it was cutting it out of magazines or copy and pasting articles, I saved every career gem I came across.
As I began to see some of the same advice and approaches repeated, I began seeing patterns in many women’s collective career experiences. At the same time, my own career awareness was expanding. I felt a shift in my behavior and—maybe more importantly—in my otherworldy expectations of myself.
Once my career awareness foundation was truly built, then I was able to start making Power Moves…
Possibly my own biggest Power Move to date has been in completing my book (of the same name!) Order your own copy of Power Moves today!
