103: Dr. David DeLong: Avoiding Career Dead Ends

Dr. David DeLong shares practical advice and approaches for staying out of career box canyons.  He offers practical advice and best practices whether you are just starting out in your career, are trying to stay relevant, or looking to reinvent your career.
He discusses:

* What to focus on in individual career development.
* Importance of continuously developing your skills.
* Why social capital may be the most important skill of all.
* The hows and whys or informational interviews (sounds boring, actually a career changer).
* Making the leap to a new career.
* Standing out as a job candidate.
* Being a financial realist.
* The passion hoax.


Please share this episode with anyone who would benefit from David’s advice. Let’s play bigger, do better, and move the world.

 
 



Dr. David DeLong, author, speaker, consultant

Dr. David DeLong is an author, speaker and president of Smart Workforce Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations find solutions to critical skill shortages and risks of knowledge loss. Dr. DeLong is also:

* A research fellow at the MIT AgeLab and has been an adjunct professor at Babson College, teaching MBA’s “Leading & Managing Change.”
* An acclaimed keynote speaker and co-author of the The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management from McGraw-Hill.
* Author of the widely praised Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce from Oxford University Press.
* Veteran researcher who has spent more than 20 years studying the strategic impacts of changing workforce demographics and knowledge loss on organizational performance.
* A source of insights from over 600 interviews in knowledge-intensive organizations developing solutions for the knowledge retention and workforce development challenges posed by Baby Boomer retirements and changing values of Millennials.
* Author of Graduate to a Great Job: Make Your College Degree Pay Off in Today’s Market, based on more than 50 case studies of Millennials who have successfully launched their careers.
* Widely quoted in the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CIO Magazine, S. News & World Report, and the Boston Globe.
* Interviewed on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Talk of the Nation.”

A former researcher at both Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School, Dr. DeLong is also:

* Co-author (with J.F. Rockart) of Executive Support Systems: The Emergence of Top Management Computer Use from Dow Jones-Irwin.
* Presenter of dozens of keynote talks and workshops in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and South America
* A widely-published writer whose work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Sloan Management Review, The Boston Globe, Newsweek International, Organizational Dynamics, Computerworld, and Magazine.
* Recipient of a doctorate in organizational behavior from Boston University and an M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.



 


Connect with David:
Website: SmartWorkforceStrategies.com
 


Theme music: Just a Little by award winning indie pop band Shadow of Whales.
Big thanks for letting me use the song!