Great careers don’t just happen. In this article, I share three strategies that I have used to manage my career, from becoming a medical laboratory technologist (MLT) to graduating business school with an MBA. Following these steps will keep your long-term career goals on track and open many—and often unexpected—opportunities along the way, no matter what stage of your career you are in. While I’m suggesting three steps, they do not necessarily have to follow in a linear sequence.
The first step to managing your career is to develop self-awareness, to get to know yourself and your goals. Learning self-awareness is an important step to understanding your skills and interests and how you can use them to shape your role in the medical laboratory profession. Assess your unique strengths and weaknesses, set timelines for career-based goals, and identify personal and professional development opportunities. Ask yourself: How do I want my life to look? How much do I value a work-life balance versus “climbing the ladder”? How will I reach my goals?
As a student, I started my self-awareness journey wanting to make the most of the skills I was learning in the classroom by translating them to settings outside the lab. After developing this set of questions and considering how I would answer them, I identified three interests I wanted to center my career around: mental health awareness, education, and advocacy for my profession.
Once you identify your priorities, the next step is to develop a career strategy. Think of this stage as creating a roadmap with self-awareness at one end and your career goals at the other. It is up to you to fill in the middle with a plan for how to turn your skills and interests into action. However, be open to recognizing that your goals and priorities may change over time and that the path you take is not always straightforward. An early component of my career strategy was involvement. As a student, I applied for the CSMLS Mental Health Awareness and Promotion Grant, which I later received. As part of this program, I created a mental health awareness campaign, compiling mental health resources from the University Health Network (UHN) and employee assistance programs into a single, easily accessible location. Resources can be hard to find in a large corporation like UHN, and I wanted to ensure employees knew their workplace supported their mental health.
As you create your own roadmap, consider your career vision, goals, direction, and action plan. Have a combination of short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. Determine what you want from your life and your career. Analyze your network of relationships and seek new, meaningful connections that will lead you to new opportunities. Turning self-awareness into action taught me how to control my career and build long-term momentum. For instance, shortly after completing my clinical placement, I was invited to talk about how employers could improve the student experience at the CSMLS Simulation and Clinical Placement Forum.
This experience allowed me to address laboratory professionals on a combination of topics that touched on mental health, education, and advocacy.
This leads me to the third step in managing your career: networking. Networking can often seem uncomfortable and awkward at first, but we live in an interconnected world and success is only achieved with others. Develop friendships and mentors (or become a mentor yourself), learn from others, and nurture new and pre-existing relationships. In my experience, networking led to more opportunities in my interest areas. For instance, addressing MLTs, managers, and employees at the CSMLS Simulation and Clinical Placement Forum empowered me to submit a poster about enhancing student-centered learning in simulation and clinical placements within the medical laboratory sciences for LABCON2017. It also led to different consulting projects during my MBA. From there, I got more opportunities to focus on consulting independently.
I encourage you to attend events in your areas of interest, meet people, have engaging conversations, and let your connections lead you to new spaces. Your career is constantly changing, and so should you. Even if you are in the late stages of your career or considering retirement, you can participate in the learning and growth of others. CSMLS offers many opportunities to get involved in proactively managing your education and professional development, including CSMLS Express courses, on-demand webinars, the monthly Insights Speaker Series, and funding opportunities through CSMLS Grants, Scholarships and Awards. Participate in projects with opportunities for learning and exposure and foster an environment of inclusion by sharing knowledge with those around you.
A great career is at your fingertips. If I have learned anything as an advocate, educator, and MLT, it is to be proactive, bold, and curious. You can get the most out of your career by following these strategies on self-awareness, creating a roadmap, networking, and realizing you can positively impact the medical laboratory profession no matter your role or personal career goals.