Deconstructing Career Success

Students pursue a University degree with the objective that they will get jobs. In reality any student who has earned a college degree is no different from 60 others in the same class. The only differentiator being the marks they have secured. Higher marks or scores help a student to be the first in line to attend an interview. Nothing more. With a vanilla college degree, getting a job in today’s market conditions is difficult. So, students take up some specialized skill courses from training institutes to earn a certificate. All students are required to execute a project in partial completion of the course and these projects are mostly generic in nature. Again, the students find themselves in a situation where their marks or grades are the only differentiator. Even after being certified, the students find themselves in the same situation that they were in right after they graduated. A decade or two ago certified professionals were few and jobs many. Certification in a certain skil...

I see students today and their parents are excessively obsessed with marks. I am not saying marks are not important, they certainly are. But focusing only on marks is not going to get everyone everywhere. By concentrating on scores, most students might make it to their dream jobs. But then, at some point in future, these people will get to a point where they find themselves demotivated and lacking the drive to go on. Getting decent scores in your 10th and 12th grade is important. This is because the 10th grade is in fact an end to the first logical step in schooling. The 12th grade score lays the foundation for further education and eventually your career. Your marks do help in getting admission to a course of your choice. One thing that most students and their parents do is ignore Inborn Talent . Some skills come to children naturally. It is important that a student’s talent must not be ignored because building a skill-set on top of inborn talent will prove rewarding with the pass...

Unlike a decade or two ago, students today are faced with multiple and diverse career options. These days the competition is very high and that is evident from the marks the students are scoring in the 10th and 12th Grade examinations. The toppers score is over 99% (various Education Boards in India).  The students who pass the the 12th-grade board examination can be classified under 3 bands with respect to the marks they score compared to the cut-off percentage for the course of their choice. STUDENT SCORE BANDS Top Band : Score is higher than Cut-off %. Middle Band : Score is in the vicinity of the Cut-off %. Bottom Band : Score is below the cut-off %. Students in the Top Band , don't have to worry too much about their career choices because they tend to get admission to the courses of their choice, whatever that may be.  For students in the Middle Band , owing to the extreme competition, there are a large number of students who are in the border-li...

We go through 15 years of schooling from Kindergarten to 12th Grade. Learning objectives of each grade are evaluated through periodic tests and assignments. Whether the learning objectives are met or not is determined by the grades a student earns at the end of each year. In each examination, the student must answer a set of questions. Each question bears a certain number of marks. If the student’s answer is right, she is awarded full marks, if the answer is partially correct or incomplete, the student is awarded a portion of marks equivalent to the correctness of the answer. Generalizing the conventional education system - typically every student starts with 100 marks in each examination. As and when a student makes an error, marks are deducted. The student’s final score or grade is what is left after deducting marks for wrong answers. The conventional evaluation system adopts a Top-Down approach to evaluate the student’s performance and has been working like this for decades. ...

We all face motivation challenges at work from time to time. In my professional experience, 95% of the people I have come across have complained about low motivation levels at work. The situation has not changed much in the last 10 years and I am sure that there will be no change in the next 10 years if we don’t do anything about it. People who complain of low motivation levels at work can be broadly classified under two heads; Category 1 : Those who are working in their chosen jobs, doing what they love doing. Category 2 : Those who are working on jobs that are forced on to them (those who were unable to get the jobs they desired but eventually compromised to take up what was available) . The following argument holds good for those in Category 1. The argument also stands for Category 2, but only when the individual is willing to pursue their current career path and do well in the years ahead. Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist and distinguished Profess...

This is  Post # 4  from a Series of  4 Posts Previous post in the series :  Talent: Talent-based education system (Post #3 of 4) Let me tell you a story about one of my team members. We called him Ace! Ace had a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. He passed with average grades and had come to my organization to write an aptitude test in the computer language C. His performance in the aptitude test was not extraordinary, but he managed to scrape through. During his interview, I discovered that his communication skills were below average, but he demonstrated an exceptional attitude. Looking back, I think I hired Ace for his attitude more than his technical skills. Ace went through the Induction Program and was deployed to one of the projects. His performance assessment for the first, the second and the third year in the company was "Below Expectations". One thing that kept him from being fired was that he was a very hard worker. He would wal...

This is  Post # 3  from a Series of  4 Posts Previous post in the series :  Talent: Determining Talent (Post #2 of 4) The need of the hour is an Education System that focuses on the Talent!. For this, the system should do the following; Identify talents  in the students, early on. Explain the student's talent to the student's parents  first and get them onboard with the concept of talent and how it helps in the future. Determine ways to  nurture and develop the student's inborn talents . Determine and provide the options to move forward  (higher education, career etc.) The student's parents play a pivotal role in the whole process, so they must be involved from the beginning. If the parents are not on board with the idea, it is sure to fail. And, this must be an optional enrollment for the parents. If they are not convinced, there is no point for the teachers to bang their heads against a wall! Usually, the parents are driven b...

This is  Post # 2  from a Series of  4 Posts Previous post in the series :  Talent: The education system Funnel! (Post #1 of 4) Continuing from my earlier post, let us now take a closer look at Talent; Say, a student Anita scores 95 marks out of 100 in Physics in her 10th-grade examination. What would Anita's talent be? Option #1 :  This is the default option of our funnel system . Anita possesses the talent to be a  Physicist  in the future. This is not all, there are more options in my opinion;  Option #2 : Maybe Anita possesses an  exceptional memory ,  she does not forget what she reads - isn't that a talent for  Teaching  or  Research ? Option #3 : Maybe Anita possesses the unique talent to review the question papers of the last 10 years and is able to  accurately predict  what type of questions are likely to come in the upcoming examination! - isn't that a talent for  Da...

This is Post # 1 from a Series of 4 Posts Note: This post is not to criticize our education system or various professions, rather, it is intended to highlight the need for a student or for an early to mid-level career professional to do a bit more. Read on to find out... Looking closer at our education system, I find that it is a Funnel first and a Learning System later. More often than not, it is a system where we Learn how to Learn ! We are exposed to a historical account  of a subject's evolution first, irrespective of whether it is an Arts course or an Engineering course. As far as technology is concerned, the students are also exposed to the technical details that enable them to solve problem simulations. In the end, it is left to the student to apply their learning in the real-life scenarios when they take up jobs. Another observation I made was that very few people apply very little of what they learn in their graduation course as they progress in their career...

This is  Post #6  from a Series of  6 Posts Previous post in the series :  Step # 4: Be prepared to put in extraordinary effort During your journey to achieve success, you will face challenges or you might discover an error in your plan and you are forced to take action to correct your course. Look at it this way, your career spans across years and decades. During this time, you are evolving continuously and your circumstances are evolving too. Your evolution may revolve around your professional preferences, your expectations from your career or even your fundamental career success criterion. On the other hand, your circumstances may revolve around your family, your business environment, technology at work or maybe even a new job. Taking an analogy from real life; When you are driving on the highway, if you see a speeding truck heading straight towards you, you don't wait for the truck to change it's path, instead, you act to save yourself and move out ...

This is  Post #5  from a Series of  6 Posts Previous post in the series:  Step # 3: Set achievable and measurable targets Once your short term goals or targets are set, get going and focus all your energies and effort to achieve your targets. The best way to move forward is to take up one or two targets and achieve them and then move on to the next one. For example, if your first target to get a Bachelor's Degree and we know that it will take you four years to achieve that. In this case, you can take up some short term course or internship during your semester breaks or holidays. So, at any given point in time, in the next four years, you are only working on your degree and your short term course/internship. To get a better understanding of the effort required to achieve your targets, let's consider an athlete who has set his mind on winning a Gold Medal in the 100 meter event in the Olympics. The athlete practices for; 8 hours a day,  6 days ...

This is  Post #4  from a Series of  6 Posts Previous post in the series:  Step # 2: Breaking down your success targets. All said, there is no harm in aiming for the stars, in fact, you have to aim for the stars when it comes to long term goals, but, wisdom lies in breaking down that long journey into multiple milestones that lead to the stars, like tree-tops. So, aim for the smallest available tree-top, climb that and then attempt to climb the next higher tree-top. Setting ambitious goals takes a long time to achieve and it also needs a lot of focus. The common people that we are, time always tends to stifle or suppress our drive to achieve. A wise man once said, " What gets measured gets done ". So, the next step after you setting the smaller goals in place, you must further breakdown each goal into  achievable  and  measurable  actions. In the earlier example; your long term goal was to be a renowned automobile designer . We had ...

This is  Post #3  from a Series of  6 Posts Previous post in the series:   Step # 1:  Your own definition of success The American poet,  Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney , said in her poem " Little Things " -  Little drops of water and little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land ... Ambitious goals take a long time to achieve. It is prudent to identify the little things that lead to the ambitious goal. And, that takes us to the next step which is, breaking down your long term goal to several smaller targets. Let's assume that your career success criterion or goal is to be a Renowned Automobile Designer . To achieve this, you must determine the following; the lowest level position in the domain, the minimum qualification requirements for that position, how to earn the qualifications, how to get the job, how to excel in the job, and finally how to get a worldwide recognition. The things that are mention...

This is  Post #2  from a Series of  6 Posts Previous post in the series:  To Win, first be willing to Win! Before you go about defining your success criterion, you must choose a profession that revolves around your core talents . Look within, be mercilessly honest with your core talents and make your talent list . Do not hesitate to take help from your parents, teachers, colleagues, friends and well wishers as they have observed you closely and will be aware of your strengths and your shortcomings. Add their answers to your talent list and then identify your core talents from this list. After identifying your core talents, determine the professions where you can put your core talents to use. When you are playing with and around your strengths, you often win . In this case, your talent drives your success. If you do not find a profession that can leverage your core talents, then choose a profession that you truly care for. Think about any jobs or sk...

This is Post #1  from a Series of 6 Posts Whether we say it or not, we all want to be successful. We invest in stock markets with a wish and hope that we will make monetary gains. We participate in competitions to win. On the same lines, we all take up professions to be successful. Success means different things to different people. People feel successful when they; achieve something - a promotion, a qualification receive a recognition or an award learn new things,  tackle new challenges or solve problems at work,  earn more money,  do something that they love doing,  make a difference to someone else's life, or see smiles on the faces of their families. Success in a profession or a career may be accomplished in 5 simple steps; Step # 1:  Write down your own definition of success.  Step # 2: Breakdown your success into multiple smaller goals or targets. Step # 3: Set achievable and measurable targets. Step # 4: Be prepare...