By Tim Ragan, owner | performance engineer
The Road to Career Constructors
In mid 2009, I had over 25 years of varied business experience and had gone through numerous career transitions (some imposed, and many self-initiated). As part of those experiences I had been through several “career transition services” including some high end, fairly pricey ones. I was generally underwhelmed by what I had experienced in the career transition industry. From 2002 on-wards I was a fully independent worker (I use the label “Free Agent”) and had realized that I needed to really develop an excellent “opportunity development” tool kit since I was constantly looking for the next contract or two even while delivering what was in my pipeline. So I experimented and through lots and lots of trial and error I got better at “looking for work and securing it”.
Two things dawned on me during this period. The first was that the path of Free Agency that I was voluntarily traveling would become the default path for more and more of us as the work world gets increasingly turbulent, driven by new technologies, disruptive business models, global outsourcing, and other features of our 21st century hyper-connected world. The second thing that struck me — most of the available products and and services for effectively navigating career transitions were woefully inadequate for the turbulent period we live in.
In my ongoing “opportunity development” activities I came across Career Coaching International; what immediately attracted me was it’s solid, step-by-step proprietary methodology that it employed to help their clients find their “perfect job” in record time. After further poking and prodding, it was readily apparent to me that I had stumbled across a “toolkit” that started to truly address the challenge of “21st century career transition as a core skill set”. So, in mid 2009 I bought the company.
The only thing about it that I didn’t really like was the name. As far as a coaching company goes, Career Coaching International says a lot. However, I personally felt — and still feel — that the coaching industry is a highly fragmented, cluttered, and confusing industry with a somewhat fluffy basic value proposition. For someone like myself who is trained as an engineer and loves the hard edges of business processes and working with high-performance teams, I found the career coaching world to be just a bit too unstructured.
For 6 years I operated the company as Career Coaching International and I used that time for researching, strengthening, and ultimately simplifying the basic methodology we employ; I also actively experimented with different configurations of coaching support and small group networking packages to see what worked best for our clients, and I worked on condensing the basic approach to both a workshop format and online training so it could be introduced more effectively to larger audiences. All that has been going on under the hood over several years; in February 2016 I formally relaunched the business as Career Constructors, with a full line of organizational and individual workshops and support packages focused on helping people develop true mastery of their professional careers and, by extension, their lives.
So, why is it called “Career Constructors“? Easy. I strongly believe that:
“your career progression is something that must be deliberately constructed, and regularly reviewed, evolved, and renewed”.
I go so far as to suggest that personal career construction must become an underlying skill set that all people wishing to survive and thrive in the 21st century must develop in themselves. It is our mission at Career Constructors to help our clients succeed in this critical 21st century undertaking — helping people develop true 21st century literacy in their career progression journey.
