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A Point of View

I once heard a historian say his entire career was
about developing a view. He studied international
history and was familiar with global politics and
economics. His vision afforded him not only a view,
but also a point of view -- he had opinions. Career
development, like history, is also a matter of
developing vision. With vision you gain a point of
view and all the opinions that come along with
perception.

One way of looking at this is to realize that by the
time you reach the end of your career, you'll have a
vision of how it all happened. You'll be able to look
back and describe every part: You'll have your own
heroic vision and you'll also have opinions about what
you see. But career development is a matter of
looking forward and only partly a matter of seeing the
big picture. Career development also requires micro
vision: that is, seeing the course of a day and the
pattern of a week. Professional growth requires you
to develop and hold both a micro vision and a heroic
vision together in your mind.

It's easier to see that big picture if you have hopes.
For example, I hope to become ___ (you fill in the
blank). But the realities of this very competitive
world make it difficult to select and pursue your
hopes. You'll have to deal with many small choices
and intervening crises. To succeed at the big picture
you must have a grasp on more immediate terrain. The
question becomes: how does my micro-vision and the big
picture fit together? And the answer is: you must
learn to understand scope.

By dictionary definition, scope means: 'the area that
the mind can cover; range of view; extent of
perception or intellectual grasp; as, beyond the scope
of a child's understanding.' But in more practical
terms, scope is a tool. Boat builders use a list of
all the construction phases they must complete to
build their boat; they call this list the scope.
Carpenters study this list, affording themselves a
vision of how their project will progress. Sometimes
it's a single page list, which usually means they're
building a small boat; yet for a large boat, the scope
list can be many pages long.

Similarly, career development requires you to have a
mental grasp of your days and weeks. In your mind you
can scope (or list) the various parts of your day and
the diverse parts of your weeks. So scope is one of
the tools of vision and has everything to do with how
the big picture and micro vision fit together. Scope
gives you a view of your career development and allows
you to hold a point of view about the problems you
encounter along the way.

© by Todd Royer. All Rights Reserved.

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Todd Royer has been writing for the internet
for 2 years. He has helped hundreds of people with
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A list of Career Development articles by Todd Royer are
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Todd Royer is a seasoned career development specialist. He is experienced in managing organizational growth by recruiting competent confident people. Currently he is Senior Partner at DiscoveryTech, Technical Recruiting.