Get Career Fit, 2nd Edition

Introduction

When you land on ‘Go’ in a game of Monopoly, you collect $200. When you hit a ball that races to the boundary line in cricket, you score four runs. When you serve in tennis and your opponent fails to return it, it’s an ‘ace’, and you win the point.

These are rules of the game. It’s near impossible to play successfully if you don’t know them. Or if they keep changing, and you don’t know they’ve changed, and you have no ability to influence how they play out.

In life, one of the biggest games we play is work. Depending on what we do and where, there are different rules attached to this game. These rules can be written and unwritten, fixed or malleable, prescriptive or general, helpful or unhelpful.

The rules for your work might require you to be at the office before 9 am, to finish at 5 pm and to take a lunch break at midday. Or state that if you hit your KPIs for the year, you’ll get a bonus. Or perhaps that you get a rostered day off each month. Typically, these rules are set by someone else — the person, organisation, industry or government you work for.

To succeed at work and across your career, you need to know not just the rules but how to navigate them (and sometimes when to ignore them) so you can get stuff done.

Many constantly changing external forces are affecting the rulebook of work. How we work and what we do at work are undergoing a seismic shift, mainly thanks to new technology, which is making us more mobile and our workplaces more flexible. At ...