Success Starts Here: Achieve Your Career Goals with a Clear Plan

We are concerned about our career progression and growth options. A few days ago, I received an interesting message on my LinkedIn feed, which prompted me to collate my thoughts in this article.

The message was from a graduate fresh out of university and read,

“How shall I reach a 50k per month salary figure with work in which there is no work pressure and can be done easily…”

This took me back a few decades when I was of this person’s age and was having similar questions in my mind.

What Drives Our Career Choices

The key driver behind these thoughts is the fact that after finishing education, most of us wish to quickly attain financial independence and fulfil our dreams. The idea of earning a certain amount while making minimum efforts is the objective, then.

The haste to make the “Quick Buck” at times motivates us to make certain career choices that we are not very proud of later. We would not have made these mistakes if we had the foresight then.

While doing my education and my initial days in the corporate world, I have attended multiple courses and training programs, technical as well as nontechnical, which taught me how to become a better Worker, Problem Solver, Manager, Leader etc.

The Role of Employers

Our employers spend lots of money on our training and development; however, they do it primarily to;

• Make us more efficient in our current role
• Make us ready for the next level

Some of them also help us in mapping our future growth with the organisation’s hierarchy, but none tell us how to plan our career as a whole. In other words, how our career would progress even when we are not a part of this particular organisation.

This is the point that we are trying to address in this post.

How should we plan our Overall Career Progression? Irrespective of which organisation, company or project we are working for.

Philosophy Behind Career Planning

If we go back a bit, our ancient scriptures state that our lives should consist of four phases or Ashrams;

1. Brahmacharya – The student phase, where we learn
2. Grihastha – We apply our knowledge and perform our duties
3. Vanaprastha – We start handing over the reins to the next generation
4. Sannyasa – We give up the material aspects of life

It would be very interesting to apply this ideology in our Career Planning and perform our actions accordingly.

Phases of Life

The 4 phases of our Career Plan could be;

The Learner

In this phase of our careers, we learn the “Tricks of the Trade”.

This is the most important phase, as we know that whatever we study in the university has a limited scope of implementation in “As Is” condition in real life. It has to undergo a lot of modifications. Apart from the technical stuff, we also need to learn a lot of other things to be successful.

The Doer

Once we have learnt our stuff, it is time to start contributing and growing. In this phase, we apply our skills, knowledge, and wisdom and perform our respective roles.

The Mentor

After achieving a significant stature and acquiring worldly wisdom, now it is our turn to start giving back. In this phase, we have to start grooming our successors.

The Philanthropist

Time to get out of the day to work and focus on giving back to society.

It is not always necessary that all these phases should happen sequentially, i.e. one after another. They can also happen in parallel. Also, there is no specific duration for a particular phase. It varies from person to person.

The only exception is “The Learner” phase. It has to always happen first, and then it has to continue till we are alive. Each day is an opportunity to learn something new.

Conclusion

While we are making our plan, we have to understand that the overall execution will depend on various Internal and External factors. While we can always overcome most of these with our determination and hard work, a few external factors may be beyond our control. They may also have the potential of throwing our entire planning into a tizzy.

We, therefore, have to allow a certain level of flexibility that permits a course correction in such EXTREME situations. We also should have a sound Plan B up our sleeves to take care of such exigencies.

Now, the most important question.

When is the right time to do our “Career Progression” planning?

The answer is “Now.” It doesn’t matter at what stage of our careers we are. If we don’t have a plan, it is always better to make one now.

This is the first post as I am starting this new journey.

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