CLMs, or Career Limiting Moves aka Career Limiting Mistakes, can happen no matter where you are in your career. My last entry highlighted a few of the more common CLMs that college students tend to make when transitioning into their first post-collegiate jobs.

Since that post I received quite a few emails from working professionals highlighting some classic bone-headed CLMs that they’ve seen or been aware of – but of course have never made themselves. What is scary is that all of these CLMs were made by experienced and fairly senior people already in the workforce who should have known better. Names, titles and companies have scrubbed to protect the culpable.

What was interesting in reading the emails everyone sent was that CLMs are made by every level of employee – from the lowliest hourly staffer to the toniest resident of mahogany row. The variety seemed endless and although most of these CLMs seemed intuitively obvious to the casual observer and therefore easy to avoid, many of these mistakes keep being made on a regular basis.

My favorite CLM example, that quite a few people sent me, is about a company that used one well-known shipping company to send out a Thank you gift to another well-known competing shipping company.

Read the rest at:

http://www.thommitchell.com/2010/03/15/clms-the-sequel/