Who Owns Your Career?

As someone who’s been in learning and development for almost 20 years, my official position when it comes to investing in your learning and development is that it’s a partnership between the company and you. I believe that companies should help resource or finance learning and growth opportunities that both serve the company and serve the individual and their career. It should have mutual benefits.

However, in the past 5 years of my corporate life, while I did get a few pieces of development, additional things that I wanted both personally and professionally that could have helped me in my role often were not considered.

So, what do you do when your company doesn’t invest in you?

My belief is that you always invest in yourself, regardless of what your company does.

Now, I’m a learning nerd and I probably have a growth mindset to a fault (if that’s such a thing). So perhaps that influences my own actions over the past several years.

There are development opportunities  I’ve paid for over the past few years that have cost thousands of dollars, and I was fortunate enough to be able to do it. I invested in coaching programs, developmental and certification programs.

But I also took advantage of a ton of free resources including:

• Podcasts (on my field, on my industry, just to learn something interesting)
• Reading articles online
• Webinars put on by vendors or professional associations
• Internal lunch and learns on the rare occasions they were offered
• Requesting time with mentors or people who had different work than I did so I could grow
• The company did pay for a learning library through LinkedIn Learning, so I took advantage of that as well. You may have Open Sesame or Udemy or Coursera as options if your company has a similar offering.

The fact of the matter is that no one will care about your career as much as you do. So, when you feel like you don’t have the resources or the support internally, you can get creative to find a way to learn and grow. 

Ideally, companies should support your professional growth. Ultimately, though, you own your career.

So, as we come into 2024, here’s a question to consider. What do you want to learn next year? Where do you want to grow? Can you ask for resources in your company and if those aren’t available, or if you aren’t successful, how can you get creative to support your own career and grow in the ways that are meaningful to you?