Author Chat: Move Up or Move On by Angela Lane and Sergey Gorbatov
Do you feel dissatisfied with the contribution you’re making? Afraid I’m falling behind? Stuck in your job with no way out, or passed over for jobs, projects or clients? If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of the above, this book is a blueprint for pursuing a career on your terms, whatever stage you’re at.
In this edition of Author Chat, Disrupt Your Career speaks with Angela Lane and Sergey Gorbatov about their book, Move Up or Move On: 10 Secrets to Develop your Career (Pearson Business, May 2024). Their book includes 10 practical ways to get clarity on where you are now, your career options, what you need to do, and how to keep evaluating your progress towards your goals. An edited version of our conversation with Angela and Sergey follows.
Angela, Sergey, thank you so much for joining us again. Why don’t you share with us why you wrote the book?
Angela: Thank you so much Claire, it is lovely to be back again. We started this journey, almost five, maybe even more than five years ago. It came because we see a need: there is a lot of people unhappy in their careers today, more than we think needs to be. We feel a lot of frustration that a lot of the advice that is available is not really good, complete guidance, and we felt that we could fill a gap.
Sergey: Angela didn’t want to betray our age, but the journey started more like 20 years ago! When organizations say, “Okay, you own your careers, you’re captains of your careers”, without providing any resources, they just left people out in the dark. If you go to Amazon and you search for ‘career’, there are more than 60,000 books, that will give you very diverse, often contradictory advice. There is a lot of confusion and misguidance. But at the same time, we know that people spend more time planning their vacation than they plan their careers. In every session, every training that we run, we ask people, “Okay, last week, how much did you invest in your career? How much did you invest in your development? How much did you invest in expanding your network?” It’s a rare occasion that people say, “more than a couple of hours”. Many say “nothing” and that’s concerning. So we really wanted to change that.
Can you please share the key concepts and messages of your book? We want our listeners to buy your book as well, but let’s get them excited about what they’re going to be learning and reading in the book.
Sergey: I’ll start with one: that concept is called ‘career on your terms’. Angela and I talk about people pursuing career on your terms, because careers are deeply personal. And while we have identified 10 behaviors that will help you no matter what and will give you greater satisfaction, those 10 behaviors will be bringing you closer to career on your terms. That is how you understand what career success means to you, what a fulfilling career is to you: it’s not someone else’s opinion, not your employer’s, not even your mother’s. So it’s really understanding who you are, what drives you, where you’re going to, what gives you satisfaction and fulfillment, and building a plan around that, and executing it.
Angela: Something else I think people can look forward to with the book is you get access to a diagnostic tool. This is a very quick survey that you can take online, and it comes back and gives you a sense of how confident you are at managing various aspects of your career. With that in hand, you can then focus your efforts on doing the things that are going to make most difference to getting ahead. And by getting ahead, to Sergey’s point, what we mean is getting more of what you’d like. There are also some phenomenal stories of individuals that bring together some of the concepts and really bring them to life.
Sergey: The diagnostic tool is completely free. It’s available online, it will take you five to eight minutes to complete. It is just 50 questions and some demographics. (To take the assessment, click here)
Angela, you refer to stories and case studies. Would you would you care to share one or two of them to get us thinking about the depth and the richness of the information you’re sharing?
Angela: There’s lots of stories and lots of examples. The one that I find very exciting is the story of a woman named Anne Lim O’Brien. She is what they call a ‘rain maker’. She’s a headhunter in the executive search business. If Anne recommends you for a job, you are going to get a CEO or board job. Her background is fascinating: she is a Chinese immigrant into the US that comes there with nothing. She’s now this incredibly influential person changing the careers of others. She entered an industry at a time when it was still relatively undeveloped, and she had to figure things out. She worked out very early on in her career, how she can add value by solving other people’s problems. Through this absolute kind of commitment to solving problems that other people care about, and doing it efficiently, she built not only her own career, but essentially built the standards for an industry. An amazing story – she’s a wonderful person. The story includes her looking back over her career, including the things that she’d do differently.
Great. We know that our listeners are going to love it. It’s a practical book, it’s rich, it’s full of stories and ideas, and we’re very grateful to you for having come to spend some time today, sharing and making sure that more people manage their careers to a greater degree.
Angela: It’s super important that they do that. We spend too much time at work, not to be doing it well.
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