Career planning as I see it

This week, I was asked some very interesting questions by a Times of India journalist about career planning. I wrote quite a bit in reply. Then I realized that the paper would probably only carry a few snippets, so I thought I could share the rest with my own students. It will be particularly appropriate for those who are going to be making their first career choices in the coming months.


On the importance of career planning:

The most important part of career planning is the vision part – knowing who you want to be, or at least knowing what you want to achieve. In my opinion, the more tactical part of knowing exactly how to get there is less important. And the purely operational part of knowing exactly when to get exactly where is even less important.

It may be useful to have short term goals, but it is far more important to have a long term vision to which you can guide your short term career decisions.

Each month, we take many decisions that influence our career paths. Most of these are quite reversible in the short term – next month you can take decisions differently and set your career in a different direction. There is a lot of flexibility – so there are literally millions of ways to get from point A today to point B twenty years down the road!

It is most important to know what the final goal is and to believe in it and visualize it, and you will get there. If you can dream and stick to your dreams and work hard for your dreams, you will most probably make them come true! It’s really that simple.


On whether career planning should be done early in life or after getting into a career:

I do think that the vision for the career should be created early in life. At that time, the mind is fresh and has the ability to dream big. As we get older and encounter more obstacles, most of us start to limit our dreams, even as our capabilities and strengths are actually increasing! This is one of the big paradoxes of life.

I must say I really like it when young people want to be the best in the world at something. It does not matter if that “something” is a small thing. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you want to be a chef. I would much prefer you want to be the best chef in even a smaller city, say, Dehradun, in perhaps a particular cuisine, say, Mediterranean cooking, rather than just wanting to be a cook. That’s the kind of vision and clarity that you can act on to guide your career choices. For me, defining a vision such as this is the most important part of career planning.

I sometimes find young people very obsessed with their job titles and pay scales from day 1 without having a vision. They are mistaken if they think they are planning their career well! They don’t even know where they want to be in 20 years, but they are very worried and conflicted about making the wrong decision tomorrow about which job to accept and at what pay scale. I don’t think that sort of approach to one’s career is very helpful. I would even call it “needless career worrying”.

In my book, it is better to know that you want to be the best Mediterranean chef in Dehradun and working towards that, rather than having no vision but worrying endlessly about whether you should join job A which is offering you a package of X or job B which is offering you a package of Y.


On the importance of career planning during the early days of one's career:

I think the best planning for one’s career is finding out what skills (and in fact even temperament) one needs to cultivate in order to be successful in one’s final goal. I like to invoke Sri Sri Ravishankar’s advice made in another context (on how to achieve happiness): “Fake it until you make it!” That is, visualize yourself at your final goal and imagine how you will have to act for that and what you will have to know, and start to become that way. This is an ongoing task and the sooner you start, the better.

At the same time, young people should not be too obsessed with what job title and package they are getting in which year of their career.


On how career planning helps advance a career:

Most importantly, career planning helps set a goal. That is 75% of the importance of effective career planning, in my opinion. The remaining 25% is that it helps define how to get to that goal, so that the goal can be achieved in a robust and efficient way.


On the role of organizations in career planning:

The organization can play three roles – to inspire, to counsel, and to train.

Inspiration here consists of showing what is possible. Typically, the most senior people of the organization can inspire dreams in the younger employees. For example, Subroto Bagchi inspires the people at MindTree, just as Vikram Sehgal inspires the people at Nagarro.

The counseling helps assess the intrinsic aptitude, strengths, priorities and preferences of the employee and tries to fit these to potential career paths in the company. At Nagarro, we have an initiative called Best Fit Mapping through which we “show the mirror” to employees so that they can understand their own personality types and figure out which career paths suit them.

The training helps fill the holes in the employee’s portfolio of skills and capabilities in order to perform well in the career paths he or she chooses. We focus a lot on this at Nagarro, and have launched our own Nagarro University initiative to make sure that the training aspect matches the career planning.