Several months ago, I read a post on the Harvard Business Review which highlighted a fantastic graduation speech by the COO of Facebook.  Read Andrew Mcafee’s article “Sheryl Sandberg’s Graduation Speech for the Ages”here to be clued in. It was a great article about a phenomenal speech, and it’s always nice to see a C level women in the tech world highlighted for something like this. I think that after reading through the article one point really stands out and that is, we women do not, a lot of times, take responsibility for our own careers. We don’t really own them. We tend to take responsibility for our households and our family’s life, however we’re not taking the same initiative with our professionals lives. And to be happy and balanced in any field, including the tech field, I believe that we have to start to do so.

Be responsible for your career

By not take initiative with our careers, we are doing a great disservice to ourselves as well as the younger women, new in the field, that look up to us. Many of us are simply allowing external sources to determine where we end up professionally. We allow society to tell us what a woman should be focusing on, and we don’t realize that we can take as much control and give as much focus to our own professional lives and still be great family leads, or whatever else we choose to be.
Thus, in order to begin to turn this tide, I believe we should all take a step back and really think about our careers. What are our dreams and goals, and what do we need to do to fulfill those? How can we make our professional dreams come true? A sacrifice is not in order, but instead a balance is called for. To find this, we must take control of who we want to be professionally and drive that vision forward because no one else is going to do it for us.

By taking control and being responsible for your career, you are the one that is in the pilot’s seat. You are determining where your career goes and fostering the success (at whichever lever this is; big or small) that you want to see. You will become more comfortable with yourself and seeing yourself as a part of your field, but most importantly you will be more confident overall, making you a better role model for the young women out there that needs us to show them the way. So what do you say girls… let’s take responsibility for who we are professionally and show ‘em how it’s done!