Lesson one
What you know now and are able to do now, what your current success is built on, will unavoidably depreciate in value unless you actively work on learning new things and building new skills. Continual professional development is a lifelong requirement, not an option. There may have been a time when once you got good at something, may be “made partner”, you could live off that for the rest of your career. If those times ever existed, they are gone now. The minute you start thinking you know how things work, you are dead.
Lesson Two
The health of your career is not dependent so much on the volume of business you do, but the type of work you do (whether or not it helps you learn, grow, and develop) and who you do it for (whether or not you are increasingly earning the trust of some key clients). In any profession, the pattern of assignments you work on is the professional development process – you just have to learn how to manage it.
Lesson Three
No matter how busy you are, you still owe it to yourself and to your career to get involved with and take charge of your own practice development activities (marketing and selling). If you let others in your firm generate the business you work on, you are putting your career development in other people’s hands – a risky move at best. If you rely on business flowing to you unsolicited, then, with high probability, it is going to be “asset milking” rather than “asset building”. What marketing and selling are about is truly practice development: Influencing the qualitative nature of what you work on, so that you use your work experience to continue to build your career.
Lesson Four
Since asset building is about managing your affairs for the long-term health of your career, you would better take charge of it yourself. Do not wait for your firm to establish formal policies to reflect concern about the balance sheet as well as the income statement. It probably should, but whether it does or not, it is in your own interest to get started yourself.
Lesson Five
Also you cannot automatically assume that what your firm “asks you to do” will always be the right thing to build your asset. For example, if you are already experienced in a certain area, chances are that others in the firm will turn to you every time an issue comes up in that area. If you don’t take charge, others will exploit your asset. You have got to be a good corporate citizen, but you have also got to learn to balance that with what makes sense for your own development.
Lesson Six
Among the worst mistakes a professional can make is under investing in marketing to existing clients. Existing clients are not only more likely to give you new business, but the business they will give you (if you work to earn) is likely to promote the value both of your skill asset and your client relationships asset.
Source: ICAI
