Managing Your Career Options Using HBDI®

Today’s Top Tip is about managing your career… Are you in the right position and doing work that you love? Or is it time to rethink your career options? A key outcome of understanding your HBDI® profile results is to align your thinking preferences to a career and positions that are fulfilling and rewarding. Being engaged at work, where we are spending 50 – 60 plus hours a week involves many factors, but managing our career options is up to us.

According to Dr. Beverly Kaye, we should take steps to plan our careers, build them and look ahead by examining our interests, values & work skills.  I would also offer that understanding our thinking preferences will help to make career choices that are  the most satisfying. She offers many tips to managing careers in her book Love It; Don’t Leave It. See the Table of Contents and first two chapters for some excellent guidance:

Key Takeaway: When mapping out potential job moves, you can take the requirements of any new position and assign them to the four quadrants; then overlay your own preferences on the model.  For example, financial responsibility would lie in the BLUE quadrant where customer relationship management would sit in RED.

Are the job requirements aligned with your preferences so that you are doing the things you prefer a majority of the time? Are there important preferences that can’t be incorporated into your current role?  For example, many business people could have artistic highlighted in the key descriptor section of their profile and that would not be something that is part of their current role…  Are there ways that you could nourish this specific preference?  Maybe enroll in a drawing class or register for an Art History class at a museum?  The moral of the story is to make sure to nurture what gives you energy and be aware of when a position drains you because the work is not fulfilling or aligned to your preferences.