What is Career Crafting? Understanding the Benefits and Drawbacks

As a certified career coach, I often remind my clients that no job is perfect. However, there are almost always a number of things you can do to make an imperfect job a little closer to perfect. This process is commonly referred to as “career crafting” or “job shaping.”

Career crafting is the process of redesigning and renegotiating the elements of your role to better suit your individual wants and needs.

There are many different types of career crafting. For example, you may be able to redesign elements related to your…

• Tasks: The work you’re doing or not doing.
• Relationships: The people you’re working with or reporting to.
• Environment: The physical space in which you’re working.
• Schedule: The days and times you’re working.

Career crafting is an employee-initiated career development process, which means it’s your responsibility. Don’t expect your boss to suggest it. This requires your active involvement. To successfully “craft” the career you want, you must advocate for yourself.

The Benefits of Career Crafting

Career crafting helps you grow professionally and achieve a greater sense of engagement and fulfillment at work without having to find a new job. This is huge! Anyone who has recently launched a job search knows it’s an extremely stressful and time-consuming process. Plus, any job change is a risk. No matter how diligent you are in your search, there’s never a guarantee that your new job will truly be better than your last.

Career crafting is also beneficial for your organization. When you’re happier at work, you are more likely to stick around and perform at higher levels while you’re there.

The Drawbacks of Career Crafting

Of course, there are a few limitations as well. Career crafting isn’t a perfect solution for everyone. After all, within any role, there are always non-negotiable elements. You can’t expect to completely rework every piece of your job just because it no longer suits you. Your organization hired you to do certain things and, while some adjustments may be possible, others won’t be.

Further, timing is very important when attempting to craft your career. You need to wait until you really know the role and the organizational/team culture. Never attempt to redesign your role immediately after being hired. This will indicate that you didn’t accept the job in good faith and may cause damage to your reputation.

Lastly, to successfully practice career crafting, you need supportive and relatively flexible leadership. Your manager must value your development and want to see you succeed, even if that means reallocating some work to accommodate your needs. Ideally, your manager will care more about retaining you (a great employee) and keeping you happy, than he or she will care about “boxing” you into your existing job description.

In my experience, most managers are open to the idea of career crafting, but they also understand it can be a challenge. Part of your job is to make it as easy on them as possible. One way you can do that is to take it slow. Don’t try to dramatically reshape your role over the span of a few days or even weeks. Realize that changes within your role may have a ripple impact within your team, and your manager may need to figure out how to best deal with that. Pleasant persistence is the name of the game.

Career crafting won’t always be the best solution, but it may be worth exploring. A lot of things may be up for negotiation if you’re willing to launch a discussion and put in the effort. Few jobs are truly carved from stone. Many can be molded and shaped for the right person and the right reasons.

If you’re interested in learning more about career crafting, check out the on-demand webinar related to this topic in the Career Success Library!

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