How to Create Your Dream Job in Your Current Role | #culturedrop | Galen Emanuele

You don’t have to quit your job to start to build your dream career. Some resourcefulness goes a long way towards taking ownership of your career path and success. The idea in this video definitely comes from a place of entrepreneurial spirit; taking initiative, being a bit scrappy, and creating a path where one doesn’t currently exist that leads to where you want to go.

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As an international keynote speaker, Galen Emanuele works with events and organizations including Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Expedia, and Safeway/Albertsons, transforming the way teams and leaders drive culture and communicate in business.

Galen’s captivating programs teach how to apply the improv concept of “Yes, And” to improve communication, team performance, and create an intentional culture of high-level engagement.

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[danapratt]

Love this great advice! I'm standing on my chair cheering. As you consider how you can gain skills and experience that can move you towards your career objective, remember to stay focused on how what you want will benefit the company. Listen to what your leader or manager cares about (i.e. employee retention, sales growth, improved margin, employee engagement, etc.). What are they taking about in meetings? How can what you want to do help them achieve their goals? Take control, take a risk and learn a lot!

[standingonkittens]

True story. I was a Middle School Custodian in 1997 when my school district started building a website. It was the early days of the web, 14.4 modems, HTML, Netscape Navigator, Alta Vista and Yahoo. They trained a teacher at each school to manage their school's pages. I was intrigued and taught myself HTML in my spare time. 6 months later I proposed a written plan to the director to appoint me as the "Web Custodian" to clean up the typos, broken links and images and other common flaws that occur on any website when it's being built by people who have other responsibilities. The director saw that the cleanup was needed and that I could do it. At first, he gave me a contract for 10 hours a month which soon expanded to 40 hours a month on top of my full time custodial job. I took over the design and implementation of the website and within 2 years left my custodial job for a web development job in a dot com (but kept my web contract). Note that that was in 1999 when the term "dot-bomb" was coined.

After a couple years of bouncing around the local dot-coms, the market dried up so in 2001, I went back to the school district and got a job as a technician, due mostly to my relationship with the district and tech director (and my proven flexibility and adaptability). After ten years of that, the district decided to outsource the tech support, and once again my job dried up and went away, but I managed to convince the district (with a Prezi proposal this time) to incorporate the website duties into a Communications job and started writing news releases along with managing the website and a cadre of "web authors" from various schools. I had some writing experience with the local weekly newspaper so that helped convince the district that I could be useful.

Eventually I talked the district into creating a Facebook presence, no small task as there was a lot of apprehension about the "what ifs" and potential negative feedback. But negative feedback, rumors and outright falsehoods were already occurring on neighborhood Facebook groups over which we had no control. My proposal (this time I brought in experts from the local university) was to get in front of the feedback and position ourselves as the authoritative source for accurate information about the district. It worked and the district has a thriving social media presence including an archive of a few hundred promotional videos I made during my time there (I didn't need a proposal to convince them of the popularity or marketing value of video, it was obvious from the first one). I left a couple years ago to work in the same capacity for the local library system, where I'm positioned to ride whatever the next wave of effective communications trends are.

I'm not saying everyone has the same opportunities I had. I am privileged as a white man in a very white community. But I made the time to explore what interested me and kept my eye open for opportunity and practiced talking up my skills and my value. I believed that I could bring value to the school district. And did I mention that I was a college dropout, having taken 14 years to get my Associate Degree from the community college? I didn't get my BA until just a couple years ago, followed quickly by a MA in Strategic Communication (through Washington State University's online degree program, naturally). I guess, if I were to summarize it, I'd say "be ready" to learn, to sell your skills, to succeed.

[onefireguy]

I am going to need to convince my bosses bosses boss, to buy a helicopter... ;) On it.