Deconstructing Career Success

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 ...