Regardless of how many degrees you earn, certifications you amass, training you receive, knowledge you gain, skills you hone or distinguished organizations you work for throughout your safety career, you may still find yourself facing challenges.
Whether it’s a job loss, taking time off to care for a family member or even working in a stagnating role, we all face these “storms in our lives and in our careers,” says Isaac Mate, Ph.D., environmental safety and health consultant, adjunct lecturer and Past Administrator of our Environmental Practice Specialty.
“But what can we do to ensure that our careers are strong enough to withstand any possible storms?” he asks. “How deep can our careers be that whenever the storm comes, we remain standing?”
Mate tapped into his decades of occupational safety and health experience to share advice on how to do this while fostering the safety career you truly desire in the webinar, “Storm Proofing Your Career: Sustaining Career Success.” He was joined by Landra Raible, Plant EHS Manager at Berry Global and Professional Development Chair for our Environmental Practice Specialty. Here’s their advice.
1. Determine Your Career Zone
“Storm proofing” can happen at any time during your career, whether you’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran. Mate recommends identifying where you are along an ideal career progression, then determining where you want to be. He has developed six zones to clarify this exercise:
- Comfort Zone: This is where you find yourself if you don’t want anything more than business as usual. It is comfortable but static.
- Fear Zone: You have decided to move out of your comfort zone and push yourself to take the next step. This is where many safety careers start or where you are when you start a new role. There’s a lot you don’t know, and your self-confidence is low.
- Learning Zone: You have “broken through the fear ceiling.” You are acquiring new skills and becoming more comfortable using them.
- Growth Zone: In this zone, you are discovering your long-term goals, dreams and larger purpose. You are committed to achievement in your career.
- Mastery Zone: You have mastered many skills in safety and are an influential leader who is blazing a new trail. You have found your purpose and are living your dream.
- Reinvention Zone: At this point, you have achieved some goals and are looking to pivot to something new within safety or an adjacent field.
Ideally, zone progression is linear, but it doesn’t have to be, Mate says. You may move back and forth as you take on new roles, shift specialties or change companies.
2. Set Specific Goals and Attach Timelines
Regardless of which zone you find yourself in, be intentional about moving to the next one, Mate advises.
Pick the zone you’re aiming to move into and the actions you should take to get there. Mate recommends determining your skill level in the following areas:
- Systems management
- Organizational culture
- Sustainability
- Risk management processes
- Performance measurement and evaluation
- Knowledge management
- Communication, engagement and influence
- Professional and ethical practice
Identify what you want to learn and how to learn it, either by finding people to learn from, courses to take, certifications to earn or universities to attend.
For example, Mate attended the World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Singapore in 2017 and decided he would submit his Ph.D. research about harm prevention in mining in hopes of presenting it at a future meeting. With this major goal in mind, he immediately laid out the steps he’d need to take to get there. He applied, won a scholarship and presented in Australia in 2023.
3. Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis Using Resumes and Job Descriptions
If you need help identifying next steps, conduct a skills gap analysis.
For example, if you are a safety and health manager and you want to become a director, review several job postings and identify the commonly required skills. Then, review the profiles of people who hold those positions and see what skills, educational experiences and certifications they possess. This will help you identify any gaps you need to fill to get to the next level.
Honing those skills allows you to be ready when the opportunity comes, Mate says.
4. Explore What You Want From Life
In addition to acquiring the technical skills necessary to advance your career, Mate recommends taking several specific steps to explore what you want from your career in a more personal way:
- Have a clear understanding of what constitutes a reasonable pace for progress.
- Do not give up too soon. Give yourself enough time to succeed.
- Learn to calmly evaluate the evidence and persevere even when the result isn’t guaranteed. Establish your own definition of success.
- Own your failures and successes; these are opportunities to learn.
- Find a mentor.
- Think about where the industry is going. How can we bring more long-term strategic thinking into our professional lives?
- Avoid personal comparisons. Benchmark yourself against your desired position.
- Dare to take risks.
5. Take Steps to Maintain the Momentum You’ve Built in Your Career
As you move forward throughout your career, you will build momentum. It’s important to maintain that momentum so you can continue to advance, Mate says. Here are some ways to achieve that:
- Identify value-adding professional organizations, such as ASSP.
- Read constantly in your core area, but also in related areas.
- Monitor the internet to get news related to your job.
- Attend training — in-person, online, webinars — regularly.
- Network.
“So often our jobs become long lists of tasks to do and items on a checklist to check off that we forget our jobs are really about people. We forget that we, ourselves, are people,” Raible adds.
Balancing core skills growth with building your network and achieving your dreams will give you all you need to seize the opportunity when the next one comes and weatherproof your career to survive the next storm.
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