Clients often come to me to seek guidance on how they should manage their career and what they must do today to protect their future, secure their career advancement, and have some control over the choices available to them as they grow in their profession. During the past decade, and particularly during the most recent five years the rate of change and its velocity have caused much consternation among mid-career and younger professionalsMillennials. They have now come to realize that merely going in autopilot in your job, leaving the management of it to the boss and the organization, does not provide for a good career growth strategy; one must look at the flux around them and develop a well-thought-out plan to protect their future. They must also retool themselves with some basics if they have failed in their early career to do so (see the last part of this blog).
I also see this now more as a trend with many professionals not jut the Millennials. When I started my career coaching practice some 15 years back, nearly 75% of my clientele then was out of work, looking for their next job, by using the tools that I provided them as a career coach. Some of this stemmed from the times we were facing: The Dot-com bubble burst of 2000, the state of the economy after the 911 attacks, the two wars the country was engaged in, and so on.
Today, with nearly 5% unemployment and the rapidly shifting economic, business, and technology landscape peoples priorities have shifted, where professionals have become more aware of the uncertainty stemming from the inexorable changes that are happening on most fronts; changes that are almost impossible to control because of their scope, size, and trend. Today, my client pool is nearly 95% working professionals looking to both protect and advance their careers. Some of them are facing headwinds in their current jobs due to political (organizational politics), competitive, and economic forces. Only about 5% of my clients today are out of work and looking for their next job!
So, what are some of the trends and what are some of the strategies that one can pursue to protect their future and keep control of their career? Here are my observations and suggestions:
Technology as Infrastructure: Technology had been a specialized field. Technology companies sold their ever-evolving products to companies in large, complicated IT packages and to consumers as appliances (computers and software apps). Now, technology has evolved into our societys infrastructure with cheap access to powerful technology stacks. Our appliances have become connected with this infrastructure increasingly more tightly. The IoT trend is an example of this.
Not everyone needs to know how to program anymore; only the best few do, working at the companies that create these stacks. We also dont need a big IT department. Now, technology is infrastructure, like our physical systems of highways and roads. This evolution allows smaller players to play the game only the big could play until very recently, forcing big companies to respond to a new breed of competitor, as well as a new consumer base.
What does this mean when it comes to managing your career? This means that you must decide early in your career if you want to pursue programming as your vocation. You can no longer be a mediocre programmer (who needs them?) and get by with landing a B job at a C company. Those companies will cease to exist. Also, as a result of rapidly trending IaaS, Paas, and SaaS (Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as Service, respectively) offerings and the ease with which they can be operationalized, an entire army of professionals from IT staffing companies (Infosys, Wipro, TCS, et al) are finding it difficult to make itself billable. This picture is only going to get worse with time in the near future.
So, what does one need to do to keep themselves employed during the next decade or more? See the trend and get into different areas of work where jobs are growing and leverage your core skills in a new direction to get ahead of the ebbing tide of jobs in these areas of IT. If you are in college and are wondering what to specialize in as you graduate, look at the investment trends of VCs and others that tell you what they are betting on for the next 5-10 years.
Systems as Components: When the transistor and the silicon revolution began in the early 1960s the starting point was a single transistor, which then costs hundreds of dollars. In the intervening times components have become subsystems and systems themselves have grown exponentially complex at price points then unimaginable. This trend of systems getting more and more complex and cheaper is inevitable.
Our ability to comprehend and model the impact of these rapid changes in how we see the future and plan for it is limited by the ferocity of these changes. As an example, let’s look at cell phones. In 1980, AT&T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those mobile phones (bricks) that appeared then. “How many can we sell by the year 2000?” they asked. McKinsey came back and said, “900,000.” And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000in the first three days. And, for the remainder of the year, they sold 120 times more. And nowmerely 15 years laterthere are more cell connections than there are people in the world.
Concomitant with this change is the integration of the human element with the complex systems and their interaction for new avenues to create economic value. Household robots, driverless cars, and remote surgery and medicine are some of the examples of these evolutionary trends. So, what does it mean to those who are entering these careers or are planning to stay in it for the next several decades? Professionals are going to need new skills to complement machines even more in how they carry out their everyday and specialized tasks. Premium is going to be on people who can integrate well with complex machines, yet provide deeper insights into what is going on when dealing with everyday problems beyond just what the machines are telling them.
What this means in the context of how you manage your career is that the foundational knowledge of systemsincluding human and social systemsis going to be at a premium because those who merely respond to what the technology tools tell them is not nearly going to be enough in dealing with the root-cause of most problems. Their insights derived from deeper understanding of complex systems must override the false positives that are likely from such set ups.
So, if you are starting out in your career or are already in the middle of your professional life what are some of the things you must become aware of and do? Here is a short list:
1.Become an Expert: Learn how to master one skill in which you engage early in your career. Deep learning of any topic will teach you to master the basics of whatever you decide to engage in and this discipline will help you in any pursuit you decide to take on later in life. Nearly 90% of my clients are not able to write their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in a tweet (140 ch.) during our first session.
2.Know your Talent: If you identify what you are REALLY good at and engage yourself in it early in your career you will master that skill better than almost anyone else. Do not try to remedy something that you are not good at or are just mediocre at. Instead, focus on improving and mastering on your innate gift.
3.Understand the Basics: There is BIG difference between merely knowing and deeply understanding something. Despite the complexity of the world that surrounds us the number of things that are basic to understanding most of what surrounds us is relatively limited in comparison. Once you master these basics you can feel confident dealing with complexity without getting overwhelmed by it.
4.Pursue your Passion: It is often tempting to go after a glamorous job or the one that pays more, or pursue something merely because someone else is doing it. Know what stirs your passions and engage yourself in that pursuit and you will experience what joyful work is.
5.Learn how to Communicate: In my coaching practice most of my effort is spent in coaching clients how to understand a situation, re-frame it, and how to communicate wellboth orally and in writingto get them what they are after. Learning how to communicate well is a life skill and investing time to learn how to be a master communicator can be the most significant career enhancing skill there is. It is also the most underrated skill in advancing ones career!
Despite the complexity of how changes are coming about and how the future is shaping, taking control of your career is not that difficult. Follow some of these tips and take charge of your career.
Good luck!
| About Author | |
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Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
Website: http://dilipsaraf.com/?p=2682
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