Must-Read: Reinvent Your Career

Careers are no longer static things that people keep forever and ever, working their way up the chain to the top, until they have a successful pension, 2.6 kids, a huge house in the ‘burbs, and wasting time, waiting for the spectre of death to finally release you from the burden of life, by playing a million rounds of golf. That’s the olden days. With the new economic landscape and continuing advancements in, well, everything, it’s difficult to take a job at 25 and continue working there until your dying day. Instead, we need to constantly adapt and change our careers. The problem is, once you get stuck in a single position for awhile, it’s tough to chance out of it.

So today we’re heading over to AskMen.com, where they have a list of things to keep in mind when you’re out there reinventing your career. For instance, among their pieces of solid advice:

Turn Your Biggest Weakness Into Your Biggest Strength
Ford executive chairman Bill Ford invoked this idea in his opening-night speech; he said it emerged during his first meeting with Ford CEO Alan Mulally. At that time, in 2006, the most cited reason among consumers for not buying a Ford was poor fuel economy. The two men resolved to make this company weakness one of its biggest strengths, and shortly thereafter plant production began shifting away from big SUVs (remember the Excursion?) and toward compacts and hybrids.

In our careers, we begin shaping our sense of what our professional strengths and weaknesses are as early as the job interview, when we?re hit with the standard question, ?What?s your biggest weakness?? We mold our response around the opportunity, but then, unwittingly, tend to carry it into the position and into our own self-awareness. I?m an editor, so it?s natural and acceptable that I?m bad at math, right? By always telling myself this, I?ve ingrained it in my identity and limited the number of opportunities I would consider — despite the fact that I engineered this weakness in the first place (back in high school, I was killing it in calculus). Wiping the strengths and weaknesses slate clean can reveal new career paths.

So head on over and check out the other tips you can use that will help you reinvent yourself as you’re planning for a new career. And then get on with it. This new career change isn’t going to do it on its own.