Are You Taking Ownership of Your Career Growth?

Having a long term clarity on your career track can often be challenging. Most of us prefer to go with the flow rather than planning out our career trajectory. However, in today's hyper competitive world, outlining your ambitions and how to achieve them is not only necessary for achieving professional success but also essential for unleashing your full potential. ACT NOW is a framework that can help you to map and realize your career goals. Keep reading to find out more.

Every person has an ambition to scale newer heights in their career right from beginning and is prepared to face all challenges for achieving those levels. While some of them are lucky to receive appropriate guidance from time to time, many do not. It is however, certain that one can achieve what one wants, only if the whole journey of career building is performed in a planned manner. If you want to build your career as per your capability and ambition, you need to ACT NOW!

The first and foremost step is to take complete ownership and responsibility of one's own career. Many people believe that parents at home, teachers in school, or managers in organizations will be doing it for them, and they just need to put their best foot forward. However, this approach and their best efforts might not be sufficient to fulfil the aspirations.

In today’s fiercely competitive world, the process of achieving desired outcomes is becoming more and more demanding. The margin of being successful or being left out is getting extremely thin, thereby making every small move excessively critical. The cut off of admissions at many universities range from 95 percentile to 100 percentile and sometimes the success is denied due to a difference of the second decimal place. This reveals that every small thing can make a crucial difference in the overall success of an individual, whether it is in terms of one’s preparation, the guidance one gets or effort one puts in.

“Success doesn’t come and find you, you have to go out and get it.”

While there could be many different ways to work on your career, one far-reaching approach would be to ACT NOW –

A – Assess strengths and areas of improvement

Do you know your strengths on which foundation of the career needs to be built? There are various tools that can be used to objectively assess an individual’s strengths. At the same time, one needs to know the weaknesses, which can not only be used as areas of improvement, but can also be remembered while planning career moves to stay away from those professions which need them in abundance.

The above information becomes an important input for best suited career planning. Can you imagine Sachin Tendulkar (the great Indian cricket legend) being a musician or Michael Jordan (the greatest basketball player of all times) being a tennis player? It is definite that if these legends would have put same effort in the mentioned fields, we would not have known them today. It was because they chose the fields that aligned with their strengths, pursued their passion, and made extraordinary efforts in a systematic manner and under able guidance, that they were able to excel.

It is therefore, imperative to carry out objective assessment of one’s strengths and shortcomings in a systematic manner using appropriate tools, before moving to the next step. It is perfectly one's own choice if one does it on their own or takes the help of an expert in doing so.

C – Choose goals aligned with your passion

What do you want to do in your life or what do you want to become? One of the frequently asked question in any interview is 'Where do see yourself after 5/10 years'? It is important to ask this to yourself at every stage and think in a focused manner to answer it.

The short-term as well long-term goal has to be aligned with your strengths as well as passion. There is no meaningful journey without a known destination. If one puts in enormous effort without identifying a clear objective, it may turn out to be like walking on a treadmill - just burning calories without leading to the destination.

It is not an easy and casual exercise to chalk out meaningful goals for oneself. This requires thoughtful introspection as well as guidance from well-wishers and experts. It may be a good idea to bounce off your shortlisted options with people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy. It would be advisable to have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. I would prefer to replace Achievable with Ambitious, as stretching your imagination may help in scaling to greater heights and unleashing your potential much better.

T – Track the life journey of your role model

When you are drawing out a plan for achieving goals on your own, one very useful approach could be to identify certain role models. These are successful people who have made an outstanding contribution and acquired a remarkable position in their chosen areas.

It will be very useful to track their career graph from beginning and see what they did differently to reach to those heights. It is not necessary that one has to exactly follow the same path, but it definitely provides a good starting point and a guide which can be used while designing your own career path.

One can try to identify role models with a larger frame, for example, Einstein could be one who was extraordinarily successful in spite of huge obstacles in life, as he could not speak for first three years of his life and was a relatively poor performer in elementary school. He can be a great inspiration for a person facing adversities and feeling disadvantaged.

At the same time, one should identify role models parallel to what one wants to become in due course, like a outstanding lawyer in a High Court or an entrepreneur who has come up with a successful startup. Their life journey would be an important input in the process of planning your own career action plan. Sachin Tendulkar, the legendary cricketer from India, identified two role models very early in life from the field of cricket, namely Sunil Gavaskar (India) and Viv Richards (West Indies), who were a great inspiration for him and their impact can be seen on his career as well as style.

N – Network Management

In today’s world networking has become a very useful tool for progressing in career. In fact, one of the major advantages of getting admission in a premier school or college is that one is able to create a sound network of friends and classmates, who can be contacted for various purposes all through the life journey, and these people will always be forthcoming to help you in any manner.

Apart from this any associations from cultural bodies, sports federations, intellectual forums, which you pursue will be of great importance. It is therefore, extremely important that you keep eyes and ears open to pick up and nurture such relationships at all times. Various social media platforms like Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram have made it very easy to connect or reconnect to maintain and expand your network.

An extremely critical aspect of this is to “never burn your bridges’’ when you are moving ahead in life. Many a times, when one is successful in getting a good transition or change, one tends to ignore previous relationships and colleagues, which may be quite counterproductive.

O – Outline you career plan

Based on the strengths, chosen goals, role model life journey, and inputs from your network, a career plan with specific actions and milestones should be drawn, which shall become the roadmap for you to take your career forward. This is an extremely critical activity as the success of any journey is largely dependent on the quality of plan and accuracy of the roadmap. In many cases, it so happens that people think planning is a wasteful activity and feel good about doing their best every day as it comes. This approach is very sub-optimal and results in compromising the best possible outcomes.

At this stage, it may be useful to take an expert advise from a Career counsellor or Executive coach, who can help in finetuning the plan in a professional manner. They bring in fresh inputs form experience of working with large number of candidates in past and deriving insights from their success stories.

“Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.”

Career planning is an ongoing activity, as there is a need to review the same periodically and alter it based on additional inputs gathered during the journey. In absence of such reviews, one might keep putting efforts in one direction and realize only after a significant period of time that one has gone off-track and needs to change course.

Happenstance (mentioned by John Krumboltz, referring to maintaining an extraordinary attitude, while encountering unexpected events), constantly changing environment, increasing competition and shifting goal posts, makes continuous review of plan necessary. Refinement of plan on an ongoing basis ensures that one is efficiently utilizing time and effort for optimal outcomes.

W – Walk out of your comfort zone

The biggest restraint in realizing one's dreams is the comfort zone which one tends to get into, as soon as one achieves a milestone. It is at this stage that people go into routine activities devoid of any risk, making their progress plateau. It is crucial to break the comfort zone, utilize one's hidden potential and unleash it to realize one's ambitions. As one becomes successful in achieving immediate goals, it is natural to start enjoying that situation and resist any change, but overcoming that stage is extremely critical for any further growth.

At the beginning of my career, I worked in an organization for more than 10 years, doing very well in a safe and rewarding environment, getting good recognition on regular intervals. At one stage, I started feeling that I could do more but am getting into my comfort zone, significantly compromising my potential. I decided to come out of it knowing that the transition is going to be quite challenging, demanding and unstable…which it was. It took almost 5 years, 2 different organizations and lot of hard work to get into next orbit of success and I never looked back.(Read more about this in my post – Are you making the right choices to be successful?)

"Life begins at the end of your comfort zone" – Neale Donald Walsch

As one does more research on career planning, which has developed significantly as a concept over last 80 years, one will come across many theories, which can be deployed to refine one’s career plan. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, John Krumboltz' Learning Theory, Trait and Factor Theory, Holland's Vocational Choice Theory and many more are often used by career counsellors to help people develop an effective career plan.

In the absence of technical knowledge about the subject and not wanting to engage a career counsellor ACT NOW is a simple approach, which can be practiced by everyone. As it is widely said, you don’t have to be genius or extraordinary in all aspects, what you need is an edge over others, which can be gained by following a systematic approach to planning your career.

So don’t wait and ACT NOW!!

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