35 Days of Career Enhancement Journey

An ongoing journey of un-called-for self-reflection, accelerated learnings, rigorous planning, ruthless prioritization, systematic execution and reiterative measurement!

Exactly T-35 days, on Nov 9, 2022, I hit the #layoff rock at #Meta for the first time in my career. Little did I know how it felt to be unceremoniously let off from a role along with 11K other Metamates, I came out of it in no time; owing to the love, support, motivation and guidance I received from the community around me.

Today, I feel happy to have gotten an opportunity to take ownership of my career, strategize and drive its progress and growth and be responsible for the outcomes.

These 35 days could be better titled as the?Spontaneous?Road-trip?to find a?New Home!

Let's break down these three elements:?

Spontaneous: Waking up to a goodbye email from my dearest workplace, especially after I was working till 2 am the previous night just to compile a document with a well-explained data story was truly devastating. However, within a few hours, I realized that there was no value in feeling betrayed, ditched and having imposter syndrome because of it.?Yes, frustration is real, however, rising to the occasion was what I had been training for all this time!

Road trip: It’s a long journey of meeting the goals/objectives by exploring myself as a traveller (user persona development), understanding pain points, possible routes/solutions and prioritizing them with impact versus effort framework, understanding trade-offs, planning execution with timelines (H1-B visa status sets up a definite timeline for me here), tackling un-planned-for barriers along the way and ensuring I am tracking the objectives against key results at every point is quite a journey. I had plans in place to go through it along with reiterating through the process to ensure I manage fluid situations and account for them towards the end goal.?This was nothing but exciting and fun, just how road trips should be!!?

New Home:?This is my objective for the first phase of this journey. It is not any home, it is the one that I defined the moment I decided to embark on this journey. I was sure to define it in a way that was challenging but not impossible, where I had a clear idea of my strengths and improvement opportunities supplemented with a plan to feed myself with the learnings that help me be equipped towards achieving my objective.?

This led me straight into wearing my?Product Management hat, and these 35 days were merely a time for me to practice being?way beyond a product manager,?to be a CEO for my brand, be a program and project manager of sorts, be an analyst, a business lead, marketing rep and much more!

Below given are the five chronological steps that helped me through this journey:??

1.?????Setting the Destination?Aka?Goals and Objectives with Key Results: I identified a high-level goal for my journey and surprisingly "finding a job" was not; as it sounds. This exercise helped me self-reflect deeply and understand what would make me satisfied and provide a feeling of achievement, and that was way more than "finding a job". This goal setting helped me get a clear picture of my?north star?opportunity which would in turn help me work towards it.

Defining clear, mutually exclusive and measurable objectives for myself was my foremost step. Later, I spent time breaking them down into objectives and key results (OKRs) to help me measure my progress against the goals.?

2.?????Understanding the Traveller?Aka?Building a User-Persona: Having identified OKRs for my journey, I went into self-exploration to build my user persona (my profile/resume/strengths/experiences/forward-looking opportunities in this case). Why did I have to do it? Don’t I know myself already? Well, knowing yourself thoroughly and segmenting your characteristics is super important. Also, thinking about your gaps and priorities acts as an important stepping stone towards defining your course of action AKA solutions and prioritization.?

Some of the questions I used to build this persona were:

• How do I react when I get angry? Can I park my anger when needed to drive a meaningful conversation without an emotional bias? Do I need to work there??
• What technical skills am I super comfortable with? If I had to define my technical strength, what would it be??
• Do I want to stick to these technical strengths or am I willing to grow them along the way??
• What are my top people skills? How can I showcase that?
• Where do I stand in delivering my POV unambiguously and concisely across the table??
• Where do I want to go next in my career? What roles can help me reach my next step? Do I have relevant experiences to showcase my skills there??
• How do I react in pressure situations? Is there something from my past experiences that I can improve on here?
• What is my concentration span? Do I need some improvement there??
• What things do I like to do and what things bore/frustrate me? Are there any habit changes I need to make??

3.?????Pain points/Gaps: To begin with, I separated empathy for my current situation and prevented bias creation that kept me from focusing my empathy towards the persona I created above. Having a clear understanding of myself along with my goals and OKRs, I started listing down things I needed to do. I jotted down pain points, knowledge gaps, needs and other things that were the “route pins” between me at that point to me being at my destination!?

4.?????The Route?Aka Solutions, Prioritizing and executing: Against each of the above pain points, knowledge gaps and other things listed above, I identified possible tasks/solutions to help me fulfil them. I categorized these solutions/tasks into 5 categories to help me prioritize them?-->?Basics, Must do’s, Go beyonds, Process Improvements, Reverse Ideas

I further plotted the?Must Do's?and?Go Beyond?onto the?Efforts versus Value graph?to map my tasks against my objectives and goals. This helped me gain a deeper prioritization towards my must-do's and go beyond.?

Tasks identified in the?Easy Wins?and?Big Bets?were the ones that I laid out a strategic project plan for, along with timelines to ensure I am performing them on time and tracking against the progress. I laid a working plan by the day, and tracked my daily deliverables, also ensuring backlogs are well-planned for.?

I also documented?Reverse Ideas?(such as preventing going into imposter syndrome and related thoughts, preventing impulsive random article reads while spending time on LinkedIn, etc.) and showcased them on the bulletin board, to continuously remind me to steer away from those as their impact towards achieving my objectives was detrimental at this point of time; essential loss of time!??

5.?????Where did we reach??Aka Metrics: I created a list of metrics I wanted to track to reach my north star. These were segregated into operational and success metrics.?

Some of the operational metrics I tracked?daily?were:?

• Number of companies at which I looked up relevant roles
• Number of relevant roles I identified
• Number of associated people I reached out to for help
• Number of follow-ups I tracked and performed with associated people
• Number of former colleagues/friends/acquaintances I reached out to along with roles in their company that I was interested in
• Time to follow-up
• Number of recruiter calls I received
• Number of interviews I got scheduled for
• Percentage of applications that resulted in rejections
• Percentage of recruiter calls that did not result in anything further
• Percentage of interviews that did not move post 2nd?round – Identify and categorize learning areas/practice areas

Some of the success metrics I tracked?weekly?were:?

• Percentage of my applications that resulted in at least 1 interview round (Usually recruiter round)
• Percentage of interviews that advanced to 2nd?rounds
• Percentage of 2nd?round interviews that moved ahead
• Percentage of interviews that were at round 3 or beyond and converted into offers

Some success metrics I tracked?bi-weekly?were:?

• Company-level expectation matching quotient on the converts (On a scale of 1-10)
• Role-based happiness quotient on the converts (On a scale of 1-10)
• Compensation-based satisfaction quotient on the converts (On a scale of 1-10)

North Star here is a?perfect score of 30!?

I hope this article helps you stay motivated throughout the process since?patience is the key! During these times of holidays, breaks and much more, I would not be surprised if we lose our calm and adopt unfocussed routes to "get a job"; especially while external factors like time on H1-B, financial hiccups, family responsibilities, travel planning, etc. are all extremely influential. The only way to do it is to keep communicating your feelings/thoughts and seeking feedback on your course of action; which will reiterate the fact of how serious you are for this journey and how inclined and passionate you are for your career along with the learning calibre you showcase along the way!?

#productmanagementjobs #jobsearch #dataanalytics #learning #layoffs #metalayoffs #learningguide #jobseekers #data #product #analytics #fraud #risk #trustandsafety #linkedinlearning #meta #visa #technology #tech #software #datanalyticsjobs LinkedIn