Author: G.RamuExploring and clarifying various dimensions on ‘career’,
helping us plan in the manner appropriate to one’s selfAbridged version of
Reflections onCareer Planning
Complimentary copy
Where am I? Where do I go from here? What is the right path
for me? How do I develop myself? All these are self-directed
questions everybody asks at different stages of their career. By
defining career as a continuous process of development and
deployment of our skills, ‘Reflections on Career Planning’, explores
these fundamental questions. Taking a multi-dimensional look at
multiple perspectives empowers and invigorates us with the choices
to enrich our careers, and thus lives, the essence of which is the
realization of our immense potential.
About the Author
G. Ramu graduated in engineering from IT BHU and later specialized in
Human Resources at XLRI, India’s premier management institute.
Ramu has experience in varied industries, including heavy engineering
(Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited), fast moving consumer goods (Asian
Paints and Britannia), and software (HCL Technologies and iSOFT).
While his corporate career provided exposure to a wide cross section of HR
functions, he believes that his experience was enriched, more importantly,
by working in organizations with varied cultures, leadership styles, and
levels of maturity.
Plunging into entrepreneurship from the corporate world, he took over as
Director of Yoganishta—a placement services company serving select IT
organizations. In January 2010, he launched 3D Talent Services Pvt. Ltd.
(http://www.3dtalentservices.com), a company that facilitates talent
discovery, development, and deployment through its online services.
Abridged version of Reflections on Career Planning
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3D Career Development Model
All of us have different notions of career. It could be in terms of money,
future, accomplishments, talent, position in organizations, and so on.
We need a common understanding of what the word ‘career’ stands
for, based on what is at the core of career. Similar to how money is to
finance and health is to the medical field, we need a core dimension
indicative of career.
In my opinion, skills are at the core of career. Based on this assumption,
I see career development as a continuous process of
developing and deploying one’s skills.
We are born with certain talents and immense potential to develop
them. The constant realization of our potential and development of our
skills together form an aspect of career; the other aspect is deploying
one’s skills. By deploying our skills, we participate in creating useful
products and services and gain or fulfil all our needs, such as money,
sense of achievement, recognition, power, self esteem etc.
Therefore, career planning would involve assessing where we are,
where we want to go and how we get there.
We can assess where we are in terms of our personal position,
professional position, and current skills. We can understand the
Personal StateCurrent CapabilitiesProfessional StateCurrentcareer positionCapabilities
deployment pathsPersonal
AspirantsCapabilities
development pathsCareer PlanTraining PlanDeployment Plan
Figure 1 This is illustrated in the 3D Career Development Model
Abridged version of Reflections on Career Planning
choices available to us on different paths we travel or develop and
deploy our skills, and choose the most suitable. Finally, based on
these, we can plan to execute those choices.
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How do I understand my current career state?
Panch mantras (five elements) of personal and
professional wellness
Our career is an integral part of our lives. It affects our well-being and
vice versa. We seek to fulfil our needs through our career. We feel good
about our lives when our career satisfactorily fulfils our needs. Five
elements are key to our sense of personal wellness: health, wealth,
leisure, relationships, and spirituality.
Similarly, there are panch mantras of professional wellness i.e., the
five elements that indicate our satisfaction at work or what we seek
from our work. When these five elements are not satisfied or fulfilled,
we are less attached to our either work or even look for an alternate
job.
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SpiritualityHealthWealthRelationshipsLeisureof Personal Wellness
Figure 1
When we seek to engage ourselves in a particular job, we need to
assess the extent to which these elements will be satisfied. Similarly,
for employers it would be important to identify the satisfaction of
their employees on these five elements and take corrective action, if
required.
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Recognition
EfficiencyAchievementMeaningfulnessLearningof Professional Wellness
Figure 2
How do I assess my capabilities?
3D capabilities profile model
We need to take stock of our current skills to plan our career in terms of
our skills development and deployment. This is similar to how we take
stock of our financial position (bank balance, savings, investments in
different instruments etc.) from time to time. However, it is slightly
more difficult as it is not as easily quantifiable as finances. At least,
that is what we normally think.
However, 3D Talent Services Pvt. Ltd. has created a model for skills,
the 3D skills profile model, based on research on profiles of thousands
of people. This helps us take stock of our skills as-is today. The model
is a structured manner of assessing or mapping a person’s skills.
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Industrieswe have worked inFunctionswe are qualified / trained in
Rolesand related responsibilities we have takenSpecialisationsSkills and knowledge cluster unique
to the functionsFunctional/Technical skillsassociated with the specialisationsBehavioral skillsthat defines how you relate to othersBusiness/management skillsin managerial or leadership rolesAvocational skillsyour non professional skills
Figure 3
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It is not enough to look just these areas i.e., what we know. For example
it is not enough for a software professional to indicate that he or she
knows C++ programming or datacom protocols. He/she would need to
also indicate or assess the depth of his/her skills. This is what we call
proficiency—the ability to handle a certain order of complexity. Our aim
is to pick up more skills or know more about other areas in our function
or specialization and also to improve our proficiency levels in areas we
are already skilled. Thus, while mapping our proficiencies we also assess
our proficiency levels.
Based on this model Training Orbit has created a 3D skills profiler to
help every individual map his or her skills.
What are the career paths available to me?
Panch marg (five paths) of capabilities development
When we analysed thousands of profiles to understand the human
behavior with respect to capability development, we concluded that
people tend to develop their skills in five different directions. We call
them the panch marg or five paths of capability development. They are
larger, deeper, wider, newer and different.
Let’s understand the different paths in a little more detail. The detailed
discussion on the same is available in the full version of this book.
Let’s experience, realise, become
Larger: This theme involves developing our skills to apply them to a
large influence. For example, a person managing 10 people aspiring to
manage 100 people or somebody managing accounts of a $1 mn company
aspiring to manage a $5 mn company, yet another person handling
sales of a territory wanting to handle sales for the whole country. Scale
is the principal driver here.
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LargerNewerDifferentWiderDeeperPANCH MARG
Figure 4
Deeper: Some of us are keen to specialise, go deep into a particular
subject, or become an expert in a particular area or a niche. For
example, a HR professional may want to specialise in training on
emotional intelligence, a writer may specialise in crime-related fiction,
or a lawyer may specialise in Intellectual Property. Specialization is
the key here.
Wider: This theme involves applying our functional skills to different
contexts. For example, a salesperson wanting to move from selling in
FMCG sector to industrial products, a software developer wanting to
move from the insurance domain to retail, a lecturer wanting to teach
in a foreign country, or a director wanting to make documentaries
instead of feature films. Context is the key here.
Newer: Cross-functional expertise is not uncommon. In fact, many
large companies encourage and promote cross-functional movement
within their companies. Some of us want to move away to a function
from the one in which we already have experience. Example: An
operations manager wanting to move into sales.
Different: Some of us find our “moment of truth” one fine day and
go on to pursue a line in which we have no experience. Example: A
business manager moving away from the corporate world to teach.
This theme is more about aspiring to do something completely different
from what we have been doing all our life and expressing our
hidden talent.
We typically aspire to develop our skills in one of these directions and
guide our learning process accordingly. Identifying which of these
themes we are aligned towards gives a sense of direction and focus
to our development effort. And, the choice we make may also change
with time.
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What are different choices of occupations?
Different ways in which we can deploy our capabilities
We fulfil our needs—panch mantras and more—by engaging our skills
to participate in creating useful products and services. By engaging our
skills, we often mean a job. However, over the years, the ways in which
we engage ourselves have changed, new ones have emerged or have
become prominent. The word ‘job’ has undergone significant change
from how it was understood earlier.
Full-time employment is one of the common forms of engaging our
skills i.e., being employed in a company on a permanent basis. Other
forms include part-time employment, being an independent provider
of professional services, entrepreneurship, and volunteering. The
differences between these are the onus or responsibility for one’s work;
the terms of engagement or contract between us and the service seeker;
and the responsibility for providing us what is expected for our services
(money). At one extreme, we have full-time employment, where our
responsibility is more towards a defined role or work and is part of a
larger team, which delivers products or services to the customer. In
turn, we are assured of security and predictability or stability of income
(at least, that is what we have always believed). At the other end of
the spectrum, we have entrepreneurship (it could be one man or a large
organization), where one takes complete business responsibility, takes
high risks and has considerable freedom.
Each of these has its advantages and disadvantages. We align to one
of these modes based on our temperament. And, further, it need not be
that we stick to one course throughout our life.
This has also been possible because of the rapid socio-economic trends
and changes. The Internet has provided many opportunities to engage
our skills and helped us in finding customers for our skills (at some other
corner of the world). Work has been shifting more easily even if the
labour has not. Dynamics of organizations are changing fast, making
them look at alternate modes of engagement to manage their costs and
handle the vagaries of business.
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These changes throw up opportunities in which we can engage in ways
we never thought of before. That is the boon of the era of talent and the
Internet.
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How do I learn and develop?
Different means of developing our capabilities
When we decide the direction of our career, in terms of deployment of
our skills (i.e., engagement model) and how we want to develop our
skills (i.e., the panch marg), we need to focus on continuous learning
and development of our skills, after assessing our aspirations, temperament,
and skills. At the core of the era of talent is learning—continuous
learning. With changes in technology, business environment, as also
socio-economic trends, the need to learn constantly becomes even more
paramount.
What to learn and how to learn from the two ingredients to the process
of learning. The “what” comes from the aspects we discussed in the
paragraph above. The “how” involves cultivating a disciplined habit or
regimen of learning based on our learning style. Today, we have many
more avenues of learning than in the past. Web 2.0 has made collaborative
learning very much possible. E-learning and distance learning over
the web or enabled by satellite takes away the constraints of distance.
We need to consciously opt for a combination of the various choices of
learning media and blend it with our temperament and create a systematic
plan. We draw financial and health plans for ourselves and invest in
them; similarly, we need to invest in our learning plan too, both in terms
of effort and in terms of time.
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TrainingAssociationsFormal educationReadingNetworkingExperiencingLearning &
DeveopmentIndependent
Professional
ServiceNetworkingExperiencing
TrainingReadingFormal educationAssociations
Figure 5
Salient Features of Career Planning
Career development is a systematic activity
With dynamic changes in the socio-economic-business-technology
around us, we would need to take assessment periodically to make
tactical adjustments according to these changes, and not necessarily to
our long-term goals or mission (such as running an enterprise).
Career development is the responsibility of the individual
Career development may sometimes be facilitated by organizations
in which we work but the ownership for development rests with us.
Our career goals may have a much broader perspective than what the
organization may expect or lay out for us. Thus, we cannot pass on this
responsibility to the organization.
Career development is a holistic process
Career development is not about the skills required to perform today’s
job well. It is also about developing our other skills and talent. Developing
our other talents means better expressing our complete self, which
is one of our subtle yet powerful aims that gives meaning and joy to our
life.
Career development is a harmonizing activity
In a way, career development is continuous balancing activity; balancing
between external and internal factors. Factors internal to us drive
us in a particular direction, make us choose some priorities over others,
and let us apportion our time and effort. On the other hand, external
factors bring opportunities, possibilities, and impose constraints. External
and internal factors are dynamic and change with time (and seem to
be changing faster all the time).
Career development is a spiritual activity
If we consider that the purpose of life is to become what we are capable
of becoming, we have to believe that career development is a spiritual
process involving the constant realization of our immense potential: a
life-long realization process.
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This is an abridged version of the book - “Reflections on Career
Planning” written by G Ramu, who holds the copyright of this book.
Other useful links:
Website of 3D Talent Services Pvt. Ltd. - the company that provides
online HR services in the space of the 3Ds - discovery, development,
and deployment - of talent. -
http://www.3dtalentservices.com
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