Career plan - getting the fundamentals right

May 28th, 2008, 9:30 pm admin Just jammin

Career planning cannot be output of a wizard. This is not an attempt to point you to your dream job position. The approach is to trigger your thought processes so that you build your career plan with the right input.

Job vs career: This can look like a mere play of words. Let us demarcate before we get into career planning mode. A career is the pursuit of a lifelong ambition or calling. A job is a stint of employment.
You can say, that a career is a collection of job stints. Yes, with one important underlying condition: that you allow good amount of time in each stint, and all stints come together to make a coherent plan. “Good amount of time in each stint”, “What is good amount of time?” – This varies with each job seeker, the company, the sector or domain that you are working on. Overall, we can say, that it is enough time so that you have learned and delivered results. However, if you keep building your career in stints, somewhere it can start looking ugly. Too many odd sized building blocks, different colors, pointing at different directions, do not build a useful structure.
Steps to creating a career plan:

1. The most important factor in creating a career plan is to determine your interests and skills. This is an important first step. Be sure that your interest comes from deep within and it is not hugely influenced by extrinsic factors.

2. When you think in terms of skills, try and get to an abstract level. Also, look at skill sets and not specific skills in isolation. You need to put together basket of skill sets that can complement each other and deliver a business result.

3. Let us qualify our interest with this example: I am skilled at inter personal relationships – let us break this down now. Am I good with communication? Can I communicate beyond medium of expression? How about languages? Which are relationship equations that I can handle well? Where do I fail? What I have learned in the last 2 weeks or a month, in this space. If you want to portray “inter personal relationships” as your core strength, you better evolve that by the week if not, by the day.

4. Once you have listed out skill sets (not isolated skills, but a set of skills that can work together), re-visit your interests. Is there a clear mapping? Repeat steps 1, 2, 3 & 4 until you arrive at a clear set of interests (which I could convert to a career plan) and mapped skill sets (with which I can deliver an impact in my career plan of choice).

5. Now you are ready to search for jobs. Just search, not apply yet. Read a bunch of open job positions, preferably global to start with, then narrowing down to target geographies. Each open job position lists requirements in terms of skill sets. See how this maps to your interests and skill sets. Now you are mapping your interests and skill sets to the job market out there.

6. Once you have short listed job positions – fast forward, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. Let us say, I map my skills to become a search engine optimizer. What do I become in 2 years, or 10 years. The answer is not: Search engine optimizer with 2 years or 10 years experience. You need evolve. Go ahead, search for resumes “search engine optimizer, 2 years or 10 years experience” – think if you can see yourself doing this.

7. You now have a career plan that maps, interests, skill sets, market opportunities and has some visibility into the future.

8. Reality is that there will be gaps. Your interests and your skill sets may not match on step one of your career. How well you bridge these gaps, and in what time frame is your pursuit. In addition, we should make provisions for levels of skill sets. As we see in this example: I am good with college foot ball, am an average player. I want to make it big – and here are skills that I need to improve: sporting temperament, tactical and fast running and so on.

9. An ideal balance point is when your job position, your career plan, your interests and your skill sets are in harmony. You will feel it when you have it – when you smell it, remember to make the best out of it. These can last for a few months or years. But, you should make these times a hallmark of your productivity and accelerate. When accelerating you are proactively disturbing this balance. The objective is to reach a higher level and regain the balance.

10. Try and conduct the above process over a few days if not weeks. When you have the conviction, pack it into your resume and, remember to show it in the interview.