How I thought about my next career move

I am in my 8th week at Wizeline, and that time has flown by (admittedly, I did have a little break in Bali in the middle of that). I thought it would be helpful to others to share how I think about career planning, and how that lead me to Wizeline.

In my past two career moves, from HP and from ThoughtWorks, there came a point where I started to think “What’s next?”  At that point, I gave careful thought to two things:  

1. What do I want to DO?

2. Who do I want to work FOR? 

This is is what I wrote down:

What do I want to DO? 

• Establish and grow a business in Australia.
• Have the potential for a leadership role in that growing business.

Who do I want to work for?

• A technology company that is experiencing strong growth and momentum.
• An international organisation that has the desire and resources to grow the business in Australia.
• An organisation that creates tangible value for its clients, and puts customers at the centre. 

I’ll share some background on why I came to that conclusion. Around 10 years ago, I interviewed to be the first employee/salesperson in Australia for a software company coming out of the U.S. During the interview, it was clear to me that they wanted a country manager that could sell. I told them directly, in the interview, that I wasn’t the person they were looking for. I didn’t have the right experience at that point to do the role justice. Don’t get me wrong, they wouldn’t have hired me for the job anyway, and we both walked away knowing that.   

That company has gone on to be wildly successful in this market.

I was reflecting on that experience and realised that now I WAS that person. In that same situation today, I would be a great fit for that role - and the idea really excited me. My assumption was that it would have to be in a product company… then along came Rich Khan from Wizeline! I met some great people through the process, including founder and CEO Bismarck Lepe, and the opportunity aligned with everything I had written down.

After eight weeks here, I am very happy with the choice I have made. Wizeline is a custom software consulting company that had its origins as a product company and has experienced very strong growth since it pivoted.

 [It is an interesting example of a customer-driven pivot that is worth a blog in itself—unless one of my colleagues writes it first.]  

We have a distributed agile product development model, with established and growing capabilities in Vietnam and Thailand, along with significant impact and amazing facilities in Guadalajara, Mexico. 

I look forward to working with ambitious, high-growth organisations to build innovative software products to better serve their customers and achieve their business goals, while also building an Australian operation that drives global growth for Wizeline.

Do you have any tips for thinking about your next career move?