Your Sustainable Career
When you get to be a certain age, or possibly before then, your career path can look like a long, disconnected, chain of jobs. But, when you take the “it all fits together” systems perspective, the natural beauty – and sustainability – emerge. I’ve been thinking about this as I fill in all the bio and profile sections on social networks lately. What do I put into a space that allows for 200 characters? Is the crucial thing about me that I am a marketing to women expert, or that I’m a writer, or communications strategist, or social media coach, or…?
Firemen have it so much easier! Yet, each of your unique career path “stops” are crucial because a sustainable career is an adaptable, compounding one that could circle back and pick back up on what you did in even your earliest job. What so many of us now have are layers upon layers of seemingly unrelated skills and expertise that together form an integrated and uniquely strong system of ways we can serve the sustainability movement and our employer/clients.
Would that it were so, but nothing stays the same. Sustainability work is never “all done.” Instead, and as is oft noted, sustainability is a journey. The knowledge and practices you experience all along the way in your career don’t make sense as one-off trips. Your youthful vacation to a small town in Mexico led you to meet a person who referred you to your next job which involved a move, and then inspired your next vacation to a whole other part of the world, which then nudged your life journey in another new direction. That’s exactly how you build a strong web of foundational experiences, skills and comfort with new things. Resiliency!
In my case, who knew that my deep understanding of how women think would end up leading me to a business writing career, which then led me to covering sustainable business, which then led me to see how, incredibly, my women’s market knowledge now came back into use for communicating sustainability messages! In isolation, one element of my path did not necessarily (or directly) flow into the other. But, for me and many others, layer builds upon layer, skills compound, and we are all ready for anything (even if that means learning another new way to apply all those skills).
So what, you say? The point is that being in sustainability-related work – however you get there – is an honor and a privilege (and really exciting). We might want to embrace that. Rather than being a frustration, the continual career re-directing and adapting we each get to do, depending on our partnerships, employer or our daily responsibilities, gives us new layers of experience, builds resilience, readies us for anything and exposes us to whole new worlds. We morph with our work because our work will ever be morphing. We did not see this coming, but that’s the point.
