Figure 4.1 Example Threats
Abraham Lincoln was a man of extraordinary wisdom and political acumen. As leader of a nation embroiled in civil war, he successfully navigated a treacherous path through many tragic years of battle, division within his own cabinet, and powerful opposition in Congress. By his death, he had achieved the legal abolition of slavery and an end to the war, but the path to get there was anything but straight. With your career high-definition destination (HDD) clear in your mind, you have probably found yourself wondering exactly how you are going to get to it. What is the path?
We hope you have had an opportunity to view the film Lincoln,1 which was released in 2012 and starred Daniel Day Lewis as the United States' 16th president. If you have, you may recall a remarkable dialogue between Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones). Lincoln says:
A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll, it'll point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what's the use of knowing true north?
In your military experience, did you ever plunge ahead heedless of the obstacles that stood in your way? Certainly not. In this chapter, we will introduce you to the second step to planning, identifying the threats or obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your HDD. If you served in combat arms in the U.S. Army, you may recognize this planning step as similar to the “Enemy Forces” component of a standard operations order (OPORD). What are the enemy's capabilities and how will that impact me? Step Two of our career-planning strategy asks what could impede you in achieving the career HDD that you have set as your objective.
With detail around the seven key areas of your HDD, we hope that it becomes much easier for you to identify the threats that stand in your way. For example, did the consideration of your location help you realize obstacles such as cost of living, transit, or proximity to career opportunities? Is there a gap between the average compensation of jobs aligned to your career interests and the total benefits you need or desire?
As you consider the threats and obstacles to your career success, consider them in two categories: controllable and uncontrollable. Controllable threats fall within your power or ability to influence. You can negate, mitigate, or avoid them. For example, if you seek a career position that requires an advanced degree that you do not possess, then you can negate that threat by obtaining that degree. You might also mitigate the requirement for an advanced degree by developing significant and compelling experience that could be considered degree-equivalent. Many job descriptions indicate experiences that are an acceptable substitute for formal education. You can also avoid such requirements by seeking career opportunities that do not demand such a degree. Remember Jim Skinner, the former CEO of McDonald's, who was an enlisted veteran? He headed a major corporation and, unlike most of his peers, he did not possess a college degree! Many threats fall within your personal ability to influence, but some threats can be very challenging to overcome. Obtaining a management position without an undergraduate degree in most major companies is becoming more and more difficult. Although you should be reasonable in determining what threats you can or cannot control, be creative and persistent in probing for ways to mitigate or avoid those threats.
Uncontrollable threats are truly beyond your control. Perhaps there were military career options that you were prevented from pursuing because of some physical disqualification. In your civilian career, you may encounter similar requirements that you simply cannot meet. If you desire to be the vice president of finance for a major company one year after you transition from active duty, but you do not have an undergraduate degree, experience in the industry, or a CPA license, there is simply no way that you can achieve such a position in so short a period of time. Along those lines, there are jobs that require certifications beyond formal education that are legally or professionally required before you can obtain such a position. You must be able to identify these threats before moving forward in your career planning.
There are also uncontrollable events that can inhibit progress toward your career HDD. What are they, and what will you do about them? What is your contingency plan if those events come to pass? Those threats can be personal, life-changing issues that involve the health and welfare of family members. Uncontrollable threats might also be the loss of a job for any number of reasons such as layoffs or even the dissolution or bankruptcy of a company. Almost everyone should recognize job loss as a threat to achieving their career HDD. We will address how to deal with those contingencies in the last step of planning in Chapter 7. For now, we simply want to identify the threats to our HDD and decide whether they are controllable or uncontrollable.
Are you not sure what the threats may be? Well, we cannot tell you all the threats that stand in the way of your personal and unique career HDD, but we can address some of the common threats, including many that you may not have considered.
In Figure 4.1 you will see some of those common threats. Notice that we have identified them as controllable or uncontrollable. We will discuss each in turn.
Figure 4.1 Example Threats
You can be the biggest threat to finding success with your HDD! Do you know what you want? Do you know what your spouse and family want? Sometimes that is even more significant a factor—or obstacle—in starting your civilian career. What about your temperament and personality? How aligned is your personality with your relationships and the career you've chosen?
The older and wiser we become, the better we know ourselves. A significant change in career presents many uncertainties. As you transition, you'll likely learn more about yourself, and that can help further develop your HDD.
We highly recommend you take a personality assessment like Myers-Briggs or the Kiersey Temperament Survey (KTS), found in Please Understand Me II by former fighter pilot David Keirsey. By understanding your personality better, you can ensure that you don't become your own biggest threat by pursuing an HDD and career that is misaligned with your core self. We recommend you read the entire book so that you gain an understanding of all the variety of personalities that you will encounter in your work and in your life. It is a great resource and a step forward in your personal development as a leader.
Just a decade ago, acts could be momentary, and statements fleeting. Today, however, we all have permanent records that exist on the Internet. We call that permanent record your virtual signature.
What happens if someone were to type your name into an Internet search engine and hit enter? If you have a good virtual signature, a potential employer will probably get a list that includes entries on sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Be aware of your social media privacy settings, and be sure to adjust them to prevent potential employers from seeing anything that could cast doubt on your professionalism or judgment. This is especially important when it comes to personal information, photos, and posts.
Although studies differ on the exact number, they agree that more than one third of employers research your virtual signature as part of the hiring and selection process. The results of their research should substantiate and reiterate the information on your resume and provide some other positive and amplifying information about you and how well you would fit in their company. If you have a great virtual signature, that employer might see that you have a professional blog that presents your skills and abilities in a very positive light. Perhaps there are news stories about your previous successes that reinforce everything on your resume. If that's the case, you have done well to cultivate a virtual signature that positively represents you. Many employers will check your virtual signature before they consider bringing you in for an interview, so ignore this threat at your peril.
If your virtual signature is anything but what a potential employer hopes to see, you have missed a huge opportunity to represent yourself and build your personal brand. Your brand should be represented in the virtual world and it should be genuine. Your virtual signature or brand should enable a potential employer to gauge how well you would fit in their organization.
We believe that the days of the resume are numbered. Resumes are designed to represent you as you want a potential employer to see you. Unfortunately, a one- or two-page resume cannot tell the whole story of you. That's what interviews are for. Your virtual signature can provide a potential employer with much more detail while, at the same time, validating your qualifications—something a resume cannot do.
You probably have a Facebook profile. But do you have a LinkedIn profile? If not, you must get to work on developing a LinkedIn profile now! LinkedIn is a rapidly developing and changing platform for professional social networking. It is already beginning to take over as a principal means for employers and recruiters to search for talent. No doubt, some of the applications and structure of LinkedIn will have changed by the time this book is published. We will discuss how to leverage the basics of LinkedIn in Appendix L because it is so important. The bottom line, though, is that if you are not using LinkedIn now and beginning to develop a professional virtual signature, you must get started. Your lack of a positive virtual signature is a significant threat to your career development. This book will help address that threat.
Although a lack of a positive virtual signature is a threat to you, having your personal information posted in virtual space can also be a threat. We recommend that you exercise good operational security (OPSEC) on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and when posting your resume and other information on job sites.
If you are transitioning off active duty and seeking your first civilian job, there is no danger in posting that fact on job boards and on your social networking sites. You want everyone to know that you are seeking an opportunity, but if you already have a civilian job and have chosen to begin looking for another career opportunity, you should be very careful. Remember that we live in a time where most any information that you seek is available if you know what you are looking for. Add to that the high connectivity of networks of people and the speed of communication. In today's world, secrets are hard to keep. If you post your resume on a job site or blatantly indicate that you are in the job market (which you can easily do on LinkedIn), assume that everyone, including your current employer, will know that very quickly. In some cases that may be what you want, but in most cases it will compromise or even jeopardize your current job status and security.
We recommend that you only post on job sites that allow you to post a resume without your name or other personal information, except for a cell phone number and a private e-mail address. You will also want to omit the name of your current employer on your resume and keep identifying information out of the description of your current position. Of course, your work history can still give away your identity to those that know you well, but using some basic OPSEC will make that very difficult.
Keeping personally identifying information off your job postings will also help protect you from a few unscrupulous recruiters that can take advantage of you. How can they do this? Imagine that you post your resume on a job-seeking site with your name and the name of your current employer. Because recruiters usually work within an industry, they may notice when companies in their industry have employees that post for job opportunities. Although it would be unethical, a morally compromised recruiter could contact your current employer, let them know that you are looking for another job and offer their services to replace you. The recruiter could also reach out to you and offer their services to place you. If they already know of a position that you may be a good fit for, they can squat on that position by getting a signed agreement from that employer and cut you off from the opportunity if you do not work through them. The end result is that you are put in an awkward position with your current employer, a good opportunity for you may be eliminated, and the recruiter gets to collect placement fees from both employers. A recruiter could even attempt to get you to sign a placement contract and attempt to charge you directly for placement services. You should never agree to pay a recruiter. Good recruiters with high integrity will not charge the job seeker; they make money by charging companies.
Recruiters can be a great resource for you. There are many good ones and poor ones. Be careful in selecting a recruiter if you choose to seek their help. In Chapter 5 we will address how to identify a good recruiter.
We noted in Chapter 1 that there are significant hierarchical distinctions between military service and business and that you must begin to transition your mindset accordingly. The significant transition that you must make is to recognize that you will not have a prescribed uniform of the day that you will put on every morning. You are going to have to maintain your own wardrobe that adheres to either a company-published dress code or to an unspoken dress code that fits the culture of the business.
The lack of a uniform can create an uncomfortable atmosphere for a veteran when it is accompanied by a flat hierarchy and a difficulty to distinguish rank and position. You may not get a brief by a new employer that clearly establishes the reporting relationships between you and everyone else your work with. When one navy veteran first took on a management position in a business, he knew who his boss was, and he knew who reported to him. But, because he was the youngest person on the management team and he had not received any clear direction on the reporting relationships of the rest of the team, he took orders from most everyone on that team. One manager in particular dropped by on a near-daily basis to provide instruction and to issue orders. The veteran had the impression that the manager was the equivalent of an executive officer (XO) or second-most senior leadership position next to his boss, the general manager. Eventually, the GM called the vet into his office and said, “Forget about what that guy tells you to do; you report to me.” Our point is that you need to ask questions about reporting relationships because just because someone holds a more senior position, it doesn't mean that everyone under them must follow their orders. These relationships are also not likely to be obvious by looking at what people are wearing.
Along these same lines, relax a bit. It's obvious when we encounter recently transitioned veterans in a business. They are the ones who say “Yes, ma'am” and “Yes, sir” to everyone. Their hair still conforms to military regulations. They might wear a few components of the uniform they used to wear on active duty such as black leather or patent leather shoes, or even a standard issue brass belt buckle. You are going to have to get used to dressing for a less structured and more flexible atmosphere. You need to quickly judge the culture and atmosphere of the business you join and adapt to the way they do things.
The business world, like the military, is full of jargon and acronyms. Acronyms and terminology can even vary among service branches. Moreover, there is jargon and acronym-laden language inside the communities within each of the services. It is no different in businesses.
As we interact with businesses each day in our work, we are constantly reminded of the language and knowledge barrier that exists between us and our clients. That is not a significant issue for us because our clients do not expect us to understand their business and industries at the same level that they do, but they do expect us to have a high level of general knowledge and literacy. Such literacy is particularly important if you intend to secure a management position in a company.
The best way to develop your language and general knowledge is by gathering information on the specific industry or interests that you identified in your HDD. Chances are that there are websites, blogs, professional organizations, books, and magazines that address your particular areas of interest. Are you interested in a career in human resources? If so, there is a professional society, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), that produces a vast amount of training and information through its website and magazine. Most professions have websites and related organizations that produce educational material. Interested in becoming a roughneck and working on oil rigs? There are a number of safety- and other industry-oriented magazines, blogs, and other sources of information and training in such an area of interest. Professional organizations are not just for those interested in management positions. Such sources exist for the development of everyone in a particular area of interest. Find out what they are for your areas of interest and start educating yourself. Learn the language of a profession by reading its literature.
We live in an age where the information you seek is available at your fingertips. Use search engines to ask questions and run searches for tips and clues to what you need to know. Ask others in the industry. Leverage your network to reach out to them and learn.
In general, civilians have great respect for what you have done through service to your country. That does not mean that they understand you. Nor does it mean that everyone you encounter in your new career will welcome you with open arms. Some will misunderstand or even fear you.
Today, the unemployment rates among veterans exceed overall unemployment rates. One of the top-cited reasons, which we will address in turn, includes a difficulty in translating military skills into civilian skills that human resources (HR) and hiring managers can understand. Another is the manner in which those skills are identified, the infamous applicant tracking systems (ATSs), software systems that have replaced human judgment when it comes to assessing the skills and fit of all applicants. Beyond these things, there can be other fears and misperceptions that work against you.
At a recent human resources conference, a discussion leader raised an important question: Why do you not hire more veterans? The discussion started out with the typical threats we outlined above. Then the courageous discussion leader asked a difficult question. She asked, “Are you concerned about post-traumatic stress?” A few sheepishly raised their hands, nervous to admit their concern. More and more hands began to go up as the conference attendees saw that they were not alone in their worry about the effects of post-traumatic stress (PTS). That story proves what few want to discuss, that fears of PTS do, in fact, affect hiring decisions for veterans.
This is certainly front-of-mind for many employers, so if you feel there is concern, we recommend you hit it head on by stating, “I know people have concerns about PTS, and I can assure you from a medical standpoint that's not something I've had to deal with.”
There is also a degree of stereotyping that takes place among civilians that you may encounter. We have spoken with several veterans who have had experiences similar to the following: A former NCO is hired into a management position with several individuals who have been with the company for many years, have had no previous exposure to military leaders, and have worked under conditions of low morale and poor results for some time. The employees are told by senior managers that a former military leader has been hired to get their department back in shape. Put yourself in the position of your new direct reports. They are already tired and fed up with the company or their previous boss, they are close to walking out for good, and they are told that a veteran is coming in to fix things. Imagine their thoughts of a boot-camp-style manager.
In one instance, a newly hired veteran was met with a very cold reception from his new team. The fear and apprehension was palpable. The veteran had no idea what his team had been through under the leadership of an incompetent and abusive predecessor. Not more than a year later, after a complete turn-around in productivity and morale, the predecessor came back to visit the offices. The bad memories returned to the team. Right after that visitor left, one of the senior members of the team approached their veteran boss and said, “You have no idea how scared we all were when we heard that some former military person was coming in to get our department straightened out. I was ready to quit. But you saved us. Thank you!” The style of good leadership that veterans bring to civilian businesses is often overlooked.
Be conscious of these stereotypes and misperceptions. In the end you will prove them wrong, but they can present obstacles to success as you make your transition into your first civilian career position.
We predict that resumes will eventually become relics of the past, but for now they are still important parts of the hiring process. You need to have a resume, and it needs to be done well. If you have been paying attention to what we have said about translating your military skills into civilian terms, the resume is where you need to spend effort doing so. Appendix D provides guidance on the proper structure of a resume, as well as some tips. You can also pay for professional resume-writing services and get some assistance from your local transition workshops and programs. We have seen some professional services offered for free to veterans as well. So, check into what is currently available through the transition services organizations at your base or installation.
We will, however, provide some broad guidance that you may or may not get from other sources or services. Word is getting out that you must translate your military experience into a language that is comprehensible to civilian HR and hiring managers, but there are still many veterans who have not received this important advice. We reiterate it here: Your resume can be a threat to landing an important career opportunity if it does not communicate that you would fit well at the hiring company.
One of the greatest threats, however, is not so much the way you describe your skills as in the humility you naturally have in describing your accomplishments. In your military experience, you were probably encouraged not to talk or brag about your accomplishments. This may be especially true if you were part of an elite branch or team. Perhaps your accomplishments were even classified. That is quite a different attitude from your civilian counterparts. In the civilian world, job hunting is all about self-promotion and you must not be shy about the great things you have done. You must highlight those accomplishments in your resume, and not be afraid to brag a little.
As you develop your resume, keep in mind that civilian employers want to see quantifiable accomplishments. Dig up all your old evaluations, fitness reports, medal commendations, and citations and use the numbers from those documents to add quantifiable accomplishments to you resume. Whenever possible, cite instances where your metrics reflect improvement by a percentage rather than a hard number. Numbers are hard to put into context, whereas percentages tell a clearer story.
Building your resume is going to be a lot easier for you once you have worked through the value proposition and demonstrations of effectiveness exercises that we present in Chapter 8. You will also discover that thoroughly filling out your LinkedIn profile will help identify and clarify some of the things that you should include in your resume.
If you have an opportunity to send a potential employer a cover letter with your resume, do so. A cover letter introduces you to an employer. It may be your first opportunity to sell yourself (refer to Chapter 8) and make a lasting impression. Cover letters are formal business letters of about three paragraphs that establish your interest in a position and why you believe you are qualified. They do not repeat information that is included in your resume.
Refer to Appendix E for a standard cover letter template. The text of a cover letter should follow a three-paragraph format. In the first paragraph, establish how you found out about the position. Hopefully, you heard of the position through someone who knows both you and the hiring manager. Establishing a common connection is a powerful and memorable way to start. It compels the reader to reach out to that common connection to find out more about you.
The second paragraph of a cover letter should explain why you would be a great fit for the position. You should summarize the most significant experiences and skills that qualify you for the job. This second paragraph is your opportunity to use a targeted value proposition. In Chapter 8, we will provide a detailed explanation of how to develop a value proposition.
Finally, you will want to close your cover letter with a paragraph that states your interest and excitement about the potential to work in the advertised position and company. Conclude with a declaration that you would be excited to have the opportunity to meet and discuss your background, then thank the reader for his or her time.
Even civilians, and probably many hiring managers, dislike applicant tracking systems. Unfortunately, they are threats you must face. As mentioned earlier, companies use ATSs because of the huge number of applicants that respond to each job posting. It is not uncommon to have hundreds or even thousands of respondents to a single posting. Imagine that you are an HR manager or hiring manager. You are already busy working long hours every day and your staff has been reduced to a small and extremely busy team, with a stack of several hundred resumes to read through to find a few top candidates to call for an interview.
Hiring managers simply do not have time for that. For now, HR departments use ATSs to address this dilemma. If you have any experience applying for job postings, you have probably recognized that many employers require you to either fill out an online application that is much like manually inputting your resume, or they require you to upload a Word document of your resume to an online system. You may think that this spits out a report with all your detailed information directly to the HR or hiring manager, but that is probably not the case. You are most likely uploading your information into an ATS that stores your data with that of an untold number of other applicants. The job that you are applying for may have a description that was designed by the hiring manager, who knows exactly what he or she needs in a good hire. In other cases, an HR manager has done his or her best to translate or describe what the hiring manager wants in terms of skills and experience from an applicant. With all the respondents' information stored in a database, the ATS simply searches for matching key words and language that you used in your uploaded resume or manual responses to questions. If you do not give the ATS the language it is looking for, it will never select your resume as a potential candidate. Regardless of your real qualifications, if the language you use does not match what the ATS is programmed to recognize as a match, no human being will ever see your resume. The ATS is a potential black hole in the employment process—so much so that even many employers are beginning to express frustration.
What hope is there? You can beat the ATS. All you need to have are the language and key words that the HR managers have programmed into the ATS—and finding that can be easier than you think. If you are responding to a job posting, just look at the description of the job that the employer has posted. It is likely that this is the very information that has been programmed into the ATS. You should use that posting as a guide to the language you need to use in your resume.
It will help a great deal if you develop your resume in a way that speaks in the general language of the type of career position that you are looking for. That way, your resume will already be formatted in a way that is friendly to the ATS regardless of which company or specific job posting you are responding to.
For guidance on how to do this, refer to Appendix F, where we will show you a step-by-step method to build the right language into your resume and beat the ATS black hole.
You have a career plan and you have identified the first job opportunity that aligns with it. You have successfully defeated the ATS, or you have made a personal connection through your professional network that ultimately led to an interview. Unless you had a career before you joined the military, you have probably never had to interview for a job before, so you probably have some anxiety about it. That's okay; some anxiety will feed your desire to do well in that interview.
Between the two of us, we have interviewed hundreds of individuals from entry-level, unskilled labor positions to executive positions. We have both been on the other side of the desk, so to speak, and have been grilled by potential employers for a position we sought. We can tell you that the interview experience is as widely varied as the job market itself. There is no single, common experience. What you experience in interviewing can be unique, or nearly so. You'll probably have some great stories to tell—and, more importantly, you'll learn about the organization you're interviewing with.
Even so, there are some standard formats you should expect. There is the one-on-one interview, where the hiring manager or HR manager sits down with you and asks you questions for about 30 minutes, thanks you for your time, and ends with telling you how or when they might follow up. You might encounter a team interview of two or more managers who take turns asking you questions. You might even encounter a large group or a panel interview. The reality is that if you are being seriously considered for a position, you'll likely have several kinds of interviews. Your interview experience may start with a telephone or video-conference interview with an HR manager that is followed up with a one-on-one, in-person meeting with the hiring manager, followed by a panel interview by the team. If this is the kind of interview structure that you experience, you are in luck because the employer that goes through that kind of trouble really cares about what they do and is making sure that they are making the right hiring decision for you and for everyone on their team.
If you were to go through the interview process here at Afterburner, Inc., you would be in store for something a bit different. You would come in to our corporate office around 1000 hours, receive a tour, meet the entire team, and then meet with Jim, the CEO, shortly thereafter. In that interview, Jim would test your general business knowledge and your knowledge of Afterburner to get a feel for your personality and overall qualifications. Then, you would go to lunch with the senior leadership team, where you would encounter more questions in an informal atmosphere. Finally, you would be given a few minutes to prepare a lesson and teach the Afterburner team. At a predetermined time that afternoon, the entire team would gather in a classroom for your lesson. Afterward, the team would debrief you in great detail on what you did right and what you did wrong. Do you have a thick skin and take criticism well? Finally, you would have the opportunity to debrief the Afterburner team on your interview experience. We show the same deference and respect for criticism from interviewees as we expect them to show us.
In all, an interview at Afterburner takes up the better part of a day for the interviewee and the interviewers. It is an enormous investment in time and effort for us. We take the process very seriously because we must be certain that we are hiring a good fit for our company. Every good hiring manager that you encounter in your career development should have the same level of seriousness about making a hiring decision as we do. That doesn't mean that they should spend a day with you, like we would. It just depends on the context of the position and the company. We are unique, so we do some unique things—many that we won't tell you about.
So, how do you prepare for interviews when their format can vary so widely? Well, it is easier said than done. First, you have to know yourself and your qualifications. Second, you have to know the business that you are interviewing. Yes, you read that right. We said that you have to know the business that you are interviewing. Interviewing is like a date. You want to get to know your date, while your date wants to get to know you. Just like a company will select a few finalists to interview and, in the end, pick one, you want to be in the same position with several companies. Best-case scenario, you have several simultaneous offers from which you will choose one. Just like the hiring company, you want to have multiple options so that you can pick the best fit for you. So, if you think that an interview is just a meeting in which you answer questions, you need to expand your scope. An interview is a time for you to ask questions, too. An interview is an opportunity to get to know a potential employer and decide if they fit your career HDD.
Chapter 8 will help you determine your qualifications. It will help you determine your qualifications so that you walk into an interview ready to tackle questions that determine how well you fit. We will help you define those qualifications in terms of the strengths that you have already developed as part of your military experience. Appendix G provides examples of many different questions that an interviewer might ask, as well as tips on how to answer those questions in terms of demonstration of effectiveness. (More on that in Chapter 8.)
Practicing for an interview is essential. We cannot stress this point enough. The best way to prepare is for you to have a friend or colleague come up with a list of questions from the appendices we offer and pretend to be an interviewer. Have them interview you and make that experience as real as possible. Do not look at your notes. Do not ask for a time out. When you can pass a practice interview, you will be ready for the real thing. Record yourself on video to watch your mannerisms and expressions, and adjust to improve your body language. Watching yourself is a powerful means of rapidly improving your skills! Furthermore, it is not a bad idea to apply to some jobs if for no other reason than to practice interviewing in a real setting. There are also professional career coaches that can provide mock interview practice and guidance for you.
Once you know yourself and are ready to interview, we provide several additional appendices to guide you through the research and question-preparation phases for each individual job opportunity. Appendix Q addresses how to generate good questions to ask an interviewer, and Appendix H takes you step by step through how to prepare for an interview. But you have to win that interview first, so before you jump right in to filling out applications and responses to job postings, you need to finish your career planning.
You have your clear career HDD, and we have reviewed some of the common threats that stand in the way of you achieving that career HDD. What other threats stand in your way? These threats can be personal or unique to you. They can be related to the kind of career, the industry, or the profession that interests you. Once you have made note of those additional threats on your worksheet, determine whether they are controllable or uncontrollable. Do not worry about how you are going to negate, mitigate, or avoid those threats just yet. We will address that later. For now it is important to just think of the barriers or challenges that stand between you and your HDD.
1 Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy (Producers) & Steven Spielberg (Director). (October 8, 2012) Lincoln. United States: Walt Disney Studios.