Abridged version

Author: G.Ramu

Exploring and clarifying various dimensions on ‘career’, helping us plan in the manner appropriate to one’s self

Abridged version of

Reflections onCareer Planning

Complimentary copy

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.

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.

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 as-

sumption, 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,

Personal State

Current Capabilities

Professional State

Currentcareer position

Capabilities deployment paths

Personal Aspirants

Capabilities development paths

Career Plan

Training Plan

Deployment Plan

Figure 1 This is illustrated in the 3D Career Development Model

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


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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.


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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Spirituality

Health

Wealth

Relationships

Leisure

of Personal Wellness

Figure 1


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Figure 2

Recognition

EfficiencyAchievement

Meaningfulness

Learning

of Professional Wellness

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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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.

Industrieswe have worked in

Functionswe are qualified / trained in��

Rolesand related responsibilities we have taken

SpecialisationsSkills and knowledge cluster unique

to the functions

Functional/Technical skillsassociated with the specialisations

Behavioral skillsthat defines how you relate to others

Business/management skillsin managerial or leadership roles

Avocational 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 as-

sess our proficiency levels.

Based on this model Training Orbit has created a 3D skills profiler to

help every individual map his or her skills.


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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 com-

pany 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.

Figure 4

Larger

Newer

Different

Wider

Deeper

PANCH MARG


Deeper: Some of us are keen to specialise, go deep into a particu-

lar 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 func-

tion 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 dif-

ferent 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.


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, tempera-

ment, 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 collabora-

tive 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 system-

atic 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.

Training

Associations

Formal education

Reading

Networking

Experiencing

Learning &Deveopment

Independent Professional

Service

Networking

Experiencing

Training

Reading

Formal education

Associations

Figure 5

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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. Develop-

ing 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; balanc-

ing 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. Exter-

nal 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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