Yesterday I shared part 1 of the Triple A Plan to protect your career from falling foul of the gender pay gap.
As I mentioned before, closing the gender pay gap requires a two-pronged approach.
There’s an obligation on companies to do more to close the gender pay pay gap, however on the individual level, you can take personal ownership to protect your own career from experiencing the gender pay gap.
The Triple A Plan to protect your career from the gender pay gap
Part 1 was exploring how to Always ASK For More.
And today, we’re going to explore Part 2 of the Triple A Plan.
ARTICULATE YOUR AMBITIONS
It’s important to discover how to articulate your ambitions so that your manager knows what career aspirations you have.
What we see in the workplace is that those who get promoted are the ones you’ve talked about and articulated their skills and their ambitions.
So it’s essential that you know WHAT you want and you TALK ABOUT what you want for your career.
Have a specific conversation with your manager about your career ambitions – where you want to see your career go and the growth opportunities you want to achieve that.
Don’t assume that your manager will hear about everything that’s available in the company or that she will always be looking out for you.
You’ll need to do some of this work yourself. It’s about taking personal responsibility.
If you hear about an opportunity in another team, an opportunity to go on secondment or an opportunity to get involved in a project that’s not directly related to what you’re doing, ask about it.
Articulate your desire and what you want to get involved with.
This keeps you front of mind.
There’s no point grumbling to yourself or to anyone who will listen “He got promoted even though I’ve got more experience and better qualifications“.
Maybe he made a point of ensuring his manager knew that he wanted a bigger job and more responsibilities so that when an opportunity became available, his name was top of the list.
The other thing to think about are the habits and behaviours you learned at school.
Women often are brilliant at working hard. We graft, work hard and get great results.
This is the perfect strategy while you’re at school, college or university. You work hard, you study hard, you revise well and you get excellent results in the form of exam grades at the end of it. That is a very effective strategy or in the education system.
But …
The workplace requires a completely different approach.
Your manager (or manager’s manager) might notice that you’re working hard or see that you’re getting good results but everyone is so busy working hard themselves that equally they might not notice.
People need to be reminded that you’re getting great results. Working hard on its own is not enough.
You need to get results but just as importantly it’s essential that you articulate your ambitions so that the right people know who you are and what you want, so that you get offered opportunities to move on and make progress.
That’s part 2 of the triple-A plan, ARTICULATE YOUR AMBITIONS.
Come back tomorrow to find out about the final part of the Triple A Plan to protect your career falling foul of the gender pay gap by Auditing Your Work.
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