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Sunday, May 7, 2000

Where will you be in five years?

Having an answer enhances success

It should come as no surprise to the current crop of prospective college graduates that 82 percent of U.S. workers believe that those who have a career game plan are more successful.
   That's according to a survey of 720 employed adults by OfficeTeam, a staffing service for administrative professionals.
   It also shouldn't surprise new graduates that they're likely to encounter some variation of the question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" during job interviews. If they're new graduates of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and they've paid a visit to the Career Services office, it's likely that they've been prepared for that inevitability.
   "The employer is checking to find out if you have any long-range goals and if you can articulate those," says John Collis, a career counselor at the university. "They're checking out your communications skills and your goal-setting abilities."
   Start with goals
   People with goals are twice as successful, motivational speaker Zig Ziglar told a crowd of business professionals last month at Selena Auditorium.
   Among his nuggets of wisdom was this one:
   "You don't have to be great to start. You have to start to be great."
   Collis' counsel to students isn't much different. "If you don't have a plan laid out of where you want to be and how you want to get there, you aren't going to get there because you don't know where you're going."
   The answers to the interviewers' questions about career goals must be honest and realistic, he says.
   "They might be writing those answers down and they may hold you to it. It shouldn't be something where you don't have any idea how you're going to get there, how you're going to do it. It needs to be realistic and achievable.
   "People need to have a game plan, whether it is to further their education or increase their job responsibilities within the company. Those are all good answers."
   The university's business curriculum emphasizes planning, which should leave the graduating student prepared for the interviewer's inevitable question, says dean Moustafa H. Abdelsamad. The most important result for the student is not the actual plan, but the experience of planning, he says.
   "You have to get people to think big if you can."
   The world is changing too fast to accurately predict the skills that the students will need long-term, Abdelsamad says. The best that the university can do is to prepare them for change.
   "We're not trying to train them for tomorrow. We're trying to train them for a long time after that. We are not training so much as we are developing because training is much shorter-term.
   "To a great extent, there is an element of truth to the saying that you create your own success by thinking ahead."
   With that in mind, and considering that I'd never have guessed five years ago that today I'd be business editor of the Caller-Times, here's my best guess about my future five years hence:
   The lines between different forms of media will blur and Marshall McLuhan will be proven wrong: The medium won't be the message. The content we provide will be king. We'll deliver it in text, audio and video. You'll find it easier to contact us directly for specific information, through more channels than the current phone, fax, e-mail and old-fashioned face-to-face.
   Will we still be on paper? Internet connection through personal computer, cell phone, pocket planner or television? Wire or wireless? If I knew, then I'd know exactly where I'd be in six years. Robin Leach wouldn't, but rest assured he'd be trying his darndest to find out.
   Since we're being interactive and futuristic, what are your goals five years hence? How will you prosper, and hence help the rest of us to do so? Let me know. My phone number and e-mail address is at the bottom of this column.
   Your answers could turn around some of the headlines that have appeared on these pages lately. We could be writing about hotel expansions to relieve the crowding, the multitude of projects keeping our contractors too busy here at home to venture north or south, and the inability of Seattle or Austin to lure the university's computer graduates from Corpus Christi.
   And, according to Zig Ziglar, you'd be among the elite because only 3 percent of people set real career goals.
  

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Tom Whitehurst

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