Looking for a fresh career perspective, direction or motivation? We caught up with Nabeel, an accomplished mentor and career coach who has coached C-Suite professionals. He shared with us career advice that has worked for a lot of professionals.
Having a career coach is like having a brand awareness campaign team behind you. They provide expert career advice and pinpoint the most valuable aspects of your professional background and they market it in the most attractive way possible to potential employers. They are well versed in network building, career planning, and personal branding, and above all, they provide a safe pair of ears.
The ICF Global Coaching Study report has it that people who receive career advice from a career coach improved their relationships, communication skills, interpersonal skills, work performance, work-life balance, and wellness. The return on investing in a career coach does not end there. People who take up career advice from a coach often receive higher compensation, a greater number of promotions, feel more satisfied with their career, feel more committed to their job, and are more likely to believe that they will advance in their careers.
With that in mind, I had an interesting chat with Fuzu's career coach Nabeel H, on career matters, and he provided insights that you would otherwise not get anywhere else. Nabeel is a multitalented mentor who is not your typical jack of all trades. In fact, he has not only excelled in his many endeavours but, he's a rockstar of them all. The executive advisor, speaker, director, coach, and management consultant, has built quite an impressive portfolio over the years.
He has advised more than 300 organizations and impacted over 5000 C-Suite professionals in areas of high-performance leadership, strategy, and personal effectiveness.
In this post, he shares career advice that will leave you well on your way to successfully launching or improving your career. Shall we begin?
1. Unlearn to learn
Nabeel began on a high note by highlighting that most professionals feel like they know everything. “It is one of the shortfalls that hinders many people from unlocking their full potential. They fail to understand that thriving in today’s fast-paced world requires adopting a learning mentality. You need to embrace the difficulty that comes with letting go of the old and learning the new,” said Nabeel.
So, how do you start?
To begin with, you have to understand that learning isn't just something that ends after finishing school. It's absolutely necessary for achieving success in life. It's a means to better ourselves, broaden our prospects for the future, and change our current situation.
Therefore, Nabeel advises you to come into the professional sphere with a blank, intellectual and mental space. Try to be curious, ask the right questions, find out what you don’t know, and put your interest out there (sharing more on this in a few).
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."- Alvin Toffler.
2. Post-pandemic professionals have to create opportunities for themselves
Before things started falling off during the pandemic, many professionals had the tendency to wait for opportunities to come to them. More so, the roles of the past that were maintained were not specialized to the types of competence required. However, the post-pandemic has seen a massive shift in the job market. The emphasis is now on more technical roles that integrate technology or having to acquire more than one professional skill.
Therefore, as a professional, you need to adopt the culture of creating opportunities. But how? Nabeel’s career advice is that you need to build your own visibility in your network, society, and the workplace. One of the key ways of getting yourself out there is by focusing on networking. Have conversations with the right people, be a part of associations where you can identify and showcase your craft. That way, you sell yourself (your competencies) by having conversations with people who can, in one way or another, accelerate your career growth.
Another way of selling yourself is by using social platforms such as LinkedIn to showcase your skills, experience, education, awards, and share information with like-minded individuals. Last but not least, is joining a professional organization that seeks to further your chosen profession and the interests of engaged individuals.
These organizations are very resourceful and offer a myriad of benefits that can help you build your network, stay current in your career and even advance your qualifications. Some of these organizations include;
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Kenya Medical Practitioner and Dentists Board(KMPDB)
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Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Uganda (ICPAU)
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Institute of Chartered Chemists of Nigeria (ICCN)
If you are interested in joining any of them, you should first try and attend one or two of their events or have a chat with an existing member to familiarise yourself with what they do.
3. Define and own your brand presence
After learning and acknowledging the importance of creating opportunities by building your visibility, the next challenge is how to establish your professional presence. Nabeel reminds us that a recruiter has seven to ten seconds to look at your CV. It raises some critical questions. How impactful is your CV? Is it eye-catching? How do you create your first impression with the recruiter on a call or interview?
He goes on to add that a recruiter creates an impression of 90% of who you are in the first two minutes. And in most cases, they will ask you, “tell me about yourself ” or “why should we hire you.” So, how do you sell yourself in those couple of minutes to the recruiter? What are you going to say? How are you going to present yourself? Nabeel highlights answers to these pressing questions and much more in his comprehensive self-mastery newsletter that has helped tonnes of readers build their brand presence.
4. Know your skills and competencies (there's a difference between the two)
Nabeel couldn't stress enough on the importance of knowing the difference between skills and competency - which many people get wrong. You can learn skills through training and practice. Whereas competencies are your natural abilities, and their efficiency is increased through training and practice. Skills are a special set of activities you do, and competency determines how well you do them. The more you practice a skill, the more your competency improves.
For example, you could possess incredible software coding skills that enable you to work only within certain perimeters but lack the competence to look at an engineering drawing and understand and determine which parameters are necessary to be programmed.
Therefore, it begs the question, what is your unique selling (USP), and how do you identify them? According to Nabeel, one of the best ways of finding your USP is through storytelling. What is storytelling? Storytelling means how you build an organization through your insights as a person. It’s how you get people in the same boat, in the same philosophy that you have in mind to propel the organization forward.
Storytelling is an arch today because it creates leaders. It creates a following. It creates the next generation of leaders. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when aiming to tell a memorable story.
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Inform - share intellectually what you know
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Engage - speak in a way that captures the attention of the audience
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Inspire - stimulate imaginative curiosity
When you communicate properly, you move seamlessly between the three states naturally. Once the story has been learned, you should concentrate on delivery and engagement - understand how you can inspire others with your story.
5. Link your passion with your purpose
Every day, people who have found success in their chosen fields tell us how they did so by following their passions. So much so that you may assume that simply enjoying what you do is all that is required to perform well. However, our discussion with Nabeel revealed that people have been thinking about passion in their careers all wrong because there is a difference between passion and purpose. Passion is doing what you love whereas purpose is doing what contributes.
As such, you should strive to find a career where you feel that what you do is meaningful and impactful (purpose) and where the activities you engage in excite you (passion)
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Source: Morten
Morten Hassen calls it the P-squared. People who operate with both passion and purpose are far more effective than those who are either only motivated by passion or only driven by purpose. Therefore, to succeed in your professional life, you must find a way to create a balance between your passions and your goals. You will have a sense of pride in being alive, knowing that your efforts are being put towards something worthwhile.
In conclusion
When it comes to your professional development, it doesn't matter how many years of experience you have. Having a trusted counsel, like a career coach, is a hidden weapon of executives throughout the world. But, you don't have to be a member of the C-suite to take advantage of this opportunity. By taking into account the career advice mentioned above, you will have a career journey that is rewarding, meaningful, impactful, and fulfilling.
