Being a visiting faculty for the last few years, I hear this one question many times. Is my current role, industry and job something I can spend my career in, I am not sure whether I will make it here. With time spent in this one area & increasing age what happens to me in long term.

Here is what I tell them:

1. Think of your career as climbing a 100 floor building. You can’t climb 100+ floors in a short period of time like Will Smith generally, he is more of an exception. The elevator is not available many times – you have to take the stairs and climb 5-10 floors per year and in 8 to 15 years you will be where you want. Patience & persistence is what is needed.
2. Competition & stress is everywhere – marketing, engineering, medicine, human capital management, finance, operations, art, sciences, computer science, investing, government and more. There is no free lunch generally. Running away from something you like only because of competition is not always the right approach.
3. Go step by step – changing your path mid way is ok if you realize you genuinely don’t want to do something that you are doing currently.
4. Try and avoid crazy shortcuts, smart work is welcome but crazy short cuts generally land us into trouble. Optimization like finding a new shorter, smarter way of doing an old thing or inventing a new area is good too but an abrupt shortcut that you know is not really the right way is not preferable.
5. Build your own niche, network and talk to people, get into habit of reading and writing, interact with people and learn things that you want to learn by short courses, certifications and so on. That tells you where the market is going and what you want to do.
6. Grass is always greener on the other side – what we do looks tough and what others do looks easier, the common thinking many have. Marketing & sales feels finance is easier, finance feels human capital work is easier, engineering feels management is easier and so on. In reality to succeed you need to work hard / smart in all areas and statistically very few get things by pure luck like a lottery – if they get it, its good but generally for majority of us, it’s going to be your smart / hard work with experience that will get you to success.
7. Be open to various types of roles and experiences across cultures in your initial 2-5 years of career as that will tell you what you really like and where you can excel / innovate / build / research and work.
8. Create opportunities out of whatever limited resources you have. Internet is a great leveller, you can build opportunities where none exist. Use it to learn, interact, write and read or to experiment.
9. Cultivate your interests and hobbies.
10. I have seen people switching after significant experience from banking to information technology, information technology to management, information technology to various types of businesses / startups, operations to human capital management, engineering to management, routine 9 to 5 jobs to teaching, engineering to acting and so on. If you pay attention to people around you, you will see many examples like these.
11. Just because you are different and others are not doing something you want / can / are doing does not mean you should stop – maybe they don’t understand you yet!!! Rather it could be the start of something that is better than many other current models – that’s how many of the best things have started sometimes.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in