As I think I mentioned a few posts ago, there are a lot of changes going on at work. Earlier this year, I had set a goal of trying something different by the end of the year. Well, it’s now Q4, and I’ve decided to move out of my current role in the company’s Finance department and into one of their Operations divisions, allowing me to be closer to the company’s business and products, where I’ve wanted to be for a long time.

Don’t worry — I don’t think this will have one iota of impact on the content of this blog, be it on value investing, personal finance, or Excel tutorials. The role I’ll be taking will still require analytical skills, and I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t think I’d learn from it.

Guess that means I should to edit my “About” page too :)

This is the first post in a series called “Managing your career – an introductory series“. The main audience I have in mind are analyst-level employees in corporate finance, but I think many parts can be applied more generally to anyone working in US corporations these days.

I work with a lot of people who are in their first corporate job after college, and I’ve been there myself as well. The most common expectation I’ve heard from them is that someone will manage their career for them, and they look to their manager and leaders in their group to do so.

While it’s true that truly great managers will look out for opportunities for you and push roadblocks away to give recognition to employees who deserve them, the sad truth is that in most corporations, there are usually very few leaders of this sort, and the corporate system makes it extremely difficult for exceptions to be made.

So, how do you go about managing your career?

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Thank god the long weekend is here. There have been a lot of changes at my work in recent months. Reorgs seem to beget reorgs, and my finance team this week found itself in the midst of an unexpected leadership change in the group we support.

Although sudden and unexpected job changes reinforce the need, no matter your work situation keeping tabs on opportunities and actively managing your career these days is essential and wise practice.

After all, what you really want are a few options when your hand is forced. Even if you don’t lose your job, being able to have a choice in your next move is freedom worth striving for.

This week, I realized that many of my teammates are younger than me, have less experience, and could use some guidance on career management, so I’ve set up some one-on-one meetings with them. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post steps and tips I’ve learned along the way on this site as well.

‘Til then, though, enjoy the long Labor Day weekend, an apropos way to kick off a series on this topic!

Much ado has already been made about The 4-Hour Workweek, including a few reviews by other personal finance bloggers, like Ramit’s over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Like Ramit, I had the opportunity to listen and meet Tim Ferriss in person (it’s just one of those perks of living close to Silicon Valley), and I found his presentation interesting enough to pick up his book a few weeks ago.

Overall, I’d say the book is about three things: developing discipline, being decisive, and making some attitude changes. Discipline comes in the form of not allowing yourself to sink time into useless time eaters (like checking email all the time, watching TV, any of the other millions of things we do to put off acting on our dreams), and being decisive means not wallowing in self pity if you dislike your job and doing something about it. Attitude changes include questioning assumptions we’ve all grown accustomed to by working in corporate America, as well as using Pareto analysis to focus on the few percentage of activities that give us the most benefit or bang for the buck.

I found myself being pretty inspired by Tim’s book. At various points in my life, I’ve experienced doing some of the things Tim mentions and can confirm that he’s 100% correct on these points. For example, I’ve taken “mini-retirements” (though I admit I could have spent them doing more exciting things than he’s done), I’ve successfully asked for a paid leave from work, negotiated cutting back on hours to go to school, and even volunteered multiple times in places where I had no access to a TV for weeks at a stretch (ahh, how different life was and how much unexpected peace I felt when I had no distractions and noise around me).

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Welp, all those interview rounds I’ve had the past several weeks paid off in the end, and I received and accepted a very nice job offer with a new company this week! I’m pretty excited and will start in just a little over a week’s time.

Not to worry, my new position is still in corporate finance, so I’ll have plenty of practice working with Excel and all the typical finance tools to create how-to posts aplenty.

Whereas my past finance positions focused mainly on scrutinizing costs related to manufacturing and operations, the new one is more focused on the revenue side of things, with a greater connection to the end-customer. The position’s scope should also be greater and offer more opportunities than did my past jobs. Always a positive.

That’s about it for now. More to come after I actually start!