Silos emphasize the importance of career planning. Counter-intuitive but true.
They frame our careers whether we like it or not.
We choose our careers based on silos.
So if you are considering a career change, use them to your advantage.
Silos and How to Use Them for your Career Planning
For the last decade or so, silo-mentality has been lambasted as the cause of all organisational dysfunction. They cause friction, create groupthink, and show up management.
All the silos we love to attack reside in Corporate Services
- Finance
- HR
- ICT
- Facilities
- Procurement
But look at these from the perspective of career planning and you can see how important they are.
They group people with similar skills, permit and encourage professional development in a specialised field and they deepen expertise.
The importance of career planning rests on your preferred specialisation. Silos encourage exactly that. Specialisation is so important when you are starting or changing your career – and through that specialisation they give focus.
The key to making silos work for you and your organisation is to recognise that their purpose is to help nurture expertise for the good of the host organisation.
So why don’t they work?
Why are there so many complaints about a silo-mentality?
And how can we show their importance in career planning?
Well, they do work, in fact. Perhaps too well. But old grain silos have a building that spans them. That’s where everything that was common to a silo was kept. Yep, that’s management.
If there’s a problem with silo-mentality in your organisation, it has nothing to do with the silos themselves. You need them to build specialisation, capacity and expertise. And if your are considering a career change, you need them to deepen your knowledge in your chosen field.
From a management perspective, optimising those silos to work together means stepping back from the silos and looking at what you’re trying to achieve.
If you are pondering the importance of career planning, silos are absolutely critical to your success.
For management, it’s a bit like making multi-grain bread, you need the individual grains but you also need to mix them in the right quantities.
For career planning, you need to choose which grain you are…
Return to Articles
Return to Career Development and Planning