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Carry Your Skills With You For Career Success

One way to take charge of your career future is to develop the work ethic and leadership skills you’ll bring to every job, wherever you find yourself. Especially in today’s tough job market, employers will take note of job candidates who show they know how to be pro-active, take the initiative, and get people to work together in teams and follow your direction, says Barbara Glacel, an executive coach based in Washington, D.C. and in Brussels. “Those are the capabilities that you can transport from one job or career to another,” and they will influence the path your career takes.

These intangible skills having to do with leadership and management differ from the job-specific skills needed to perform particular tasks, says Glacel. She tells the story of a young woman who received her master’s degree in liberal arts and then found the only job she could get was answering the phone at a non-profit organization. At first she was bored; then she realized that there was actually a lot for her to do—if only she became pro-active and started volunteering to help out with projects her overworked bosses didn’t have time to deal with. Within a year, based on references about her take-charge and can-do attitude, she had found a job in the career track she wanted, in public relations.

Sometimes those capabilities and training become so ingrained, you’re not even aware of it. While still an active duty Army Captain, for instance, Peter Young had already signed up for the maximum number of credits allowed for his night-time graduate business degree program. Wanting to complete the program even sooner, he asked the dean’s permission to beef up his course load even more. “I was told that was too much, that it couldn’t be done, but I had the confidence that if I applied myself, I’d figure out how to fit everything in.” In the end, the dean gave in—and Young successfully completed a program that normally takes a minimum of three years, in a mere two.

That’s when it hit Young, now head of trading at Intana Management in New York, that the time management skills, work ethic and can-do persevering attitude that had enabled him to accomplish this feat were the very abilities that had become second nature to him in the course of his four years at West Point and his five years as an Army Officer.

Lessons about judgment and decisiveness cut across all fields, whether public or private sectors. John Fio Rito, former Army Captain who now specializes in real estate development in New Jersey says that, “One of the lessons I learned was that as a manger or leader you have to be on site, to be on top of what’s going on. You’ve got to be there to give direction, purpose, and motivation—and if you’re not there, either the job won’t get done or someone will start making decisions that may or may not be in line with your plan. As a good leader, you make sure your subordinates also know the plan, but you also have to be prepared to be there yourself.”

You also learn—and carry with you, wherever you go—the knowledge that whether as troop leader or project manager, you are the one who is responsible. “That’s the key lesson to bring to civilian life,” Fio Rito believes. “You have this moral obligation to do the best you can possibly can,” because your colleagues, subordinates and superiors are depending on you. And when they see that your actions live up to those goals, “you will develop a reputation as the guy who takes the job seriously. The leader who will take care of them.”