Friday, October 05, 2007

Musings about alternate career paths........



I was talking to a colleague today and ended up listening in to a conversation about how she is dissatisfied with what she is doing and not really sure what she wants to do in her life. I could sympathise a lot with her given that I am prone to such musings myself but a ‘cynical alter-ego’ inside me was also telling me that she needs to take charge of her career. While I was thinking about it, a relatively more senior colleague (seen it –done it kindz) dished her the same advice about her having to take charge of her career/life and I found myself wondering whether my ‘cynical alter-ego’ was just a manifestation of the Organisational dominant logic – that somehow one has to just learn to love their job and not look for that perfect job.

Another parallel hot-conversation topic in the confines of our work-floor has been about a Strength finder test that everyone in our team has done recently and apparently my perceived strengths (in my mind) are: Strategic, Activator, Relator, Futuristic and Ideation. And of course I have done a fair few similar profiling like MBTI and Belbin etc etc. None of the profiles of-course though give a definite guidance regards best career choice and are fairly open to mixed interpretations.

This however leads me to conclusion that my skills or strengths whatever we call it definitely crosses more than one type of profession and surely my skills don’t fit neatly into only a particular type of job or assignment. Would it then not be better to actually do three different jobs at the same time and look after my career like a portfolio? The idea is not to hold three bad jobs and wishing to figure out what to do with myself. Rather, it is a scheme to pursue purposefully and positively, as a way to achieve financial and personal goals or a mixture of both. This new type of career choice could include three different types of assignments in the same company at the same time, which are completely different from each other or having a normal job, alongside self-employment and some volunteer work.

I guess a lot of people – especially from the current generation feel alienated when they feel there is more to themselves that they have not shown in their work. Most young people I know and I would venture (deep down) most people in the middle of their careers as well look at the idea of the career as a vehicle to fulfillment, self-actualisation and a search for happiness. Therefore they are unlikely to be ever satisfied with the idea of one narrow career. This must be compounded a lot more in existing career ladders where we are bracketed into specific skills and competencies.

I suspect that the trick in a portfolio style career decision will be figure out the intersection of our skills and our passions. This has to be an on-going process and not a final destination and therefore a portfolio of part-time careers might be more conducive to this path of discovery than a single eight-hour-every-day career. I am guessing and now this is driven more by a personal hypothesis that the best balance of a portfolio type career will be best served if it has at least one creative assignment, one where we can do something for the general betterment of others and one intellectually engaging assignment.

Is it too much to ask for?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

no it is not too much to ask for. I think this is a problem which all of us face and at times we really wonder " ki charge kaise lun"

I always had this - karna kuch aur chahti hun, and karti kuch aur hun. I wanna do much more than what i am doing now. I dont want to say ki time nahi hai ya opportunities nahi hai.. but pata nahi something is missing. ...

Recently i started getting involved in various activities in the same company and also started doing something different on weekends. It has surely given me a lot of satisfaction but let us see how far can this last