All that Career Advice on an Index Card!

Having now worked with more than 7,000 clients in 23 countries I have experience with a variety of professionals—from Bollywood movie stars and Hollywood music directors to neurosurgeons. Although most of my clients are professionals in the high-tech, manufacturing, and service industries that include hedge funds, VCs, and investment banking, I also work with entrepreneurial clients launching their new ventures. The singular reason for giving you this broad list of my client experience is to convey to you what I am presenting in this blog and subsequent blogs: Career management is an individual-centric and not a job-centric issue in most cases. 

Once I realized this common thread across all the different professionals, I have engaged with over the past two decades as a career coach, it was easy for me to distill all the career advice I have given to my clients, who range in ages from 14 to 73 years, on to a single 3”x5” index card shown below:

In this series of blogs, I plan to expand on each of the 11 canonical principles that have resulted from addressing clients’ myriad career challenges, one blog post at a time, to provide my perspective on each of the 11 principles listed on this index card. 

If you have any insights that expands this perspective, I’d love to hear from you in the Comments section for the respective blog post.   

#1 Your first. Job: New-college graduates often get excited about landing their first job, as they should. For them, until then, their entire life has been taken up by pursuing their education towards the degree they coveted. Now that they have that in their hands, they want to land an exciting job that gives them the pathway to their professional future. Often, their primary focus is on which job offers them the most money, rapid growth, and some status among their peers. In so pursuing a new job they often end up landing a role that quickly results in disappointments, disillusionment, and career setbacks. Studies have shown that nearly 30% of the new graduates realize that they are in the wrong job in their first year and either wait for things to get better (they rarely do) or quit their job in search of something “better.”

This is when they begin their trial-and-error approach to career management. They fail to realize that landing their first job is one of the five major transitions (paradigm shifts) they must learn to navigate in one’s career arc if they see getting to the CEO role as the brass ring and the ultimate stop of their career. In my subsequent blogs I plan to elaborate on each of the other four shifts that are required to go to the next level of your career if you want to pursue the management path all the way to becoming a CEO. 

The reason a first job requires a major shift of one’s mindset is because a new graduate has spent 16-18 years or more (if you are a PhD) in a classroom or a lab. What it takes to ace your studies and secure good grades requires a regimen that is very different from what it takes to learn the ropes in a new job. This often requires your ability to work collaboratively with others, often in a team setting. This is something few colleges teach how to do. This has become a serious impediment to employers in countries like India, where the gap between the academic regime and business is abysmal. Many employers in India spend a year or more re-programming new graduates hired before they are ready for their first job in their companies. 

Also, most academic exercises are well defined problems that have a clear solution. Real-life problems and projects are often ill-defined, and they need a different approach to getting to the right solution, all of which is a new experience to the fresh graduates. If they cannot adjust to this regime, they often get disillusioned, thinking that any other job may be better than the one they just landed. Thus begins their search for something that is simply illusory. 

Navigating through this fog of confusion is not easy for new graduates. Taking the easy way out they go after jobs that are in high demand and that pay high salaries, without regard to what areas of work really interests them and where their passions really lie. Speaking of passions, many people are constantly searching for this illusory career siren. My own view is that passion comes out of having done something with engagement and effort and realizing the fruits of that labor. Passion is not a driver but a result of your engaged pursuit. You need some motivation to pursue what your aptitudes direct you to do and then you must apply yourself to achieve some proficiency in that pursuit. Remember:  

Aptitude + Effort = Talent

Talent + Effort = Mastery

Thus, “Effort” is the common factor in graduating from developing talent to developing mastery. In my own view developing mastery in an area of interest does not stop you from expanding your talent repertoire to other areas of pursuit essentially because the process is the same. Having myself gone through four different careers during the past five decades and having seen first-hand many of my clients transitioning into new careers (reinvention) the process of mastering any new area of interest is the same. Therefore, securing the first mastery is so critical to one’s later career successes. 

This first step in one’s career is critical to getting the rest of the career on a sound footing. I have seen many clients, who maunder through the first phase of their career (25-35 years), jumping from job to job, not finding their footing, and then compounding this mistake by getting their MBA at 35, hoping that they will find their calling once they have their MBA after their name. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not disparaging getting an MBA; but I am stating that if you do not manage your first part of the career right no MBA can bail you out!

Good luck!