Our Careers & Career Management

Was wondering, much of our lifetime is spend at work and workplaces. Work, as an idea, is both familiar and maddeningly abstract. Presently critical global and local forces are underway which would change the nature of work as we know it today. Rapid developments in technology are creating new forms of work eliminating other and also redefining how we design Careers out of work in and out of the organisations. Indeed in many occasions our economic and social wellbeing is derived from social work experiences. But is work or career is meant to be something to pay our bills, or something that defines us or something that integrate or disintegrates us? With the integration of artificial intelligence , Machine learning etc at the workplaces, that’s not merely a philosophical question. If an individual can creatively answer it, would have the potential to create incredible personal value !

A career is an individual's metaphorical "journey" through learning, work and combination of life roles that one plays at a given life stage. Career is an evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time, evolving because nobody knows what future will bring concerning both work and time because it is over time that someone can change the way they work or it can be changed for them by outside forces. Metaphorically in today's globalised connected work places even the ideas of employment & career are changing fast and with chaotic pace like ever shape shifting world i.e. Protean world.

Douglas “Tim” Hall (Hall, 1996) said ‘The career is dead—long live the career!’- & protean career is the future .

Protean Career or career mindset would mean, to be in a continuum of self & career renewal and always ‘work in progress’ state of mind which is unlike ‘you have arrived’ situation.This mindset would engage in a sense making process at the individual level with Self-knowledge (or identity) and adaptability as ‘meta-skills’ which are used for learning how to learn. Whether you are open for gigs or open for suitable options inside the organisation is purely subjective/ might vary from person to person.

Individual’s attempt to change career is not a search for identity, as common sense would suggest; it is really a construction of Individual’s identity driven by the person's reversible movements of perception and expression in his or her encounter with the world and alterity.

Learning is the key element for Individuals adaptability, according to Douglas Hall on the time span parse there two types learning : task related learning and Self-related learning which can be long and short term in nature. 

Short-term Learning: Performance or skill learning & about the self involves learning about one's personal attitudes Changing performances and attitudes both affect current experience at work. Learning to improve task performance over a long time requires learning how to adapt to changed task conditions over time.

Long Term Learning:And taking a long-term perspective on the self over time means learning about one's identity and how one constructs one's views of reality.

Most of the organisations where I worked were keen to invest on short term learning initiatives ,the intelligent career holder has to understand the fact that the driver for one's career is self; knowledge based careers [STEAM Science, Technology, Engineering , Arts & Maths ].whose knowledge domain gets upgraded rapidly at neck breaking pace across the globe , the more self is invested, the better nourished are their careers. On one's learning balance sheet long term investment and short term investment learning agenda should be well balanced. So all the protean career holder, behold please check your vital investments, a MOOC here and there, a seminar attendance when necessary on your own cost ..

Also ,Can the private universities create and sell 'career centre' sort of product to the corporates where the career centres can behave like a MOOC offline or a lifeline to smoothen the career transition not only at the career beginning but at all stages. In this Moksha patam[snake and ladder] board game of career for individual it would act a new lease of life or a ladder to happier times.

So like to know How you intend to plan and manage your career ? what does your career mean to you ?