Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

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about

Over last 25 years, I have experienced multiple R&D roles in small startups and large multinationals, across multiple geographies (China, US, India) and domains (payments, e-learning, edtech). I consider myself a mix of leader & strategist, entrepreneur & org builder, product creator & problem solver, and now, researcher & systems thinker.

  • Completed a month working in Shanghai!

    I completed a month working now, and it has been a good experience so far. Working in a country where native language is not the language you know is interesting, for techies (and everyone else I guess) have a tendency to break into passionate discussions in their mother tongue once in a while, and I have to watch and read the emotions sans language to understand what is being said. But my Chinese lessons are progressing and I hope to be able to understand more in due course of time. At office, it is interesting to observer that issues in building a group in China are very similar to doing the same in India (something I was part of); this shows clearly that culture is a much bigger part of the problem (and solution) in any such endeavor, rather than process and people. More on this topic later.

    I have been spending some time in looking through various career guidance/counseling/management sites that have come up in India in recent times. I was hoping to find some good career management sites that I could recommend on this blog, but my search continues. Given that I did spend time looking through them and comparing them, I thought maybe it will be useful to share those comments with you. I will do that in some subsequent posts. Let me know if there are specific sites you have in mind. I will post a list of sites in a day or two which I plan to review.

  • Thoughts from my India Visit – Careers

    As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent a month in India recently (August, 2008) before coming to Shanghai to join Microsoft here. I commented on the education system and related aspects that I observed. In this post, I will talk about my observations on working professionals and how careers are moving (or not). Please keep in mind that my thoughts and observations are based on talking to a few friends and relatives I met during my visits and by absorbing what media had to offer (newspapers and TV channels). While this is not a comprehensive analysis, I tried to be as objective and as broad as possible in my discussions, so hopefully you will get a good flavor.

    Things that are still the same as they were couple years back:

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  • Thoughts from my India Visit – Education System

    As I may have mentioned in my previous post, I spent a month in India recently (August, 2008) before coming to Shanghai to join Microsoft here. In this post, I will comment on the education system and related aspects that I observed. In the next post, I will talk about my observations on working professionals and how careers are moving (or not).

    I got a chance to spend some time in each of 3 different types of cities, which I believe covers a large spectrum of India. I spent couple of weeks in NCR area (National Capital Region, Delhi and adjoining area) which is a Tier 1 city with all the glitter and pace of a big city. I then spent a week in a steel township in North India (called Bokaro Steel City), where studying hard is the only thing students know about success, which has produced a large number of engineering and medical students and boasts of some great schools of the region. This exposed me to some students and their struggles to make it to the top. I then also got a chance to visit a village town in North India where education (and then moving out) seems to be the only way of prosperity for most of the new generation, where other means of livelihood are extremely limited.

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  • What determines Job Complexity and why it is important?

    In one of my previous posts on job complexity, I described constituents of job complexity (hierarchy, spread, geography, and budget) and the dimensions of organizations that impact it (processes, structure, culture). And even though I had left it vague (because anything more would have been too prescriptive), I was hopeful that it will be useful to some since it described where to look for. Also, I was confident that since job complexity changes are infrequent and slow, it is not too big an issue when handling career questions for an individual. However, how job complexity is becoming increasingly important factor was driven home to me recently, twice within 2 days.

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  • Administrivia: Back from hibernation

    As you would have noticed, I haven’t been posting on this site for couple of months now. Things have been hectic on personal and professional front. Big news is that I will be relocating to Shanghai, China; a new company, a new country awaits me, and I am excited about the opportunity to learn and experience so much. I am in US till end of the month (July), will be on vacation in India (Aug) and then join in China (Sep). I will be start posting in couple of days, there are lots of topics I have been holding off on! Thanks for being patient.

  • Measuring Career Growth – Final (career phases framework)

    This is the last article in the series on Measuring Career Growth, which started off by talking about measures of success and implication of having multiple measures vis-à-vis time, and was followed by posts on financial and learning goals, followed by a post on job complexity and satisfaction. As I promised in the last post, I will try to provide some framework to handle these measures in some useful way when we engage in our career planning and review.

    As I mentioned before, job complexity and job satisfaction are important measures, but difficult to quantify in any meaningful way; I have found them more useful in subjective reviews of the career plan. In this post, I have focused on Financial and learning measures and their interplays with time elapsed.

    Assuming that you have defined your financial and learning measures that you want to achieve over a defined time period, following table describes various scenarios that may happen. I use a positive and negative signs to denote that actual value is more or less than planned value. This means that + is good in financial and learning column (achieved more than planned) but bad in time column (using more time than planned).

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  • Measuring Career Growth – Part III (Job Complexity and Satisfaction)

    This is the 3rd post in the series on measuring career growth, and a follow-up to the post on financial and learning goals. In this post, I will talk about 3rd goal (job complexity) and also touch upon the job satisfaction aspect of all these goals, which came up in one of the comments.

    Job Complexity goals: As I mentioned before, this is a hard one to measure since it changes infrequently and there are too many parameters that influence this. Job complexity come from how many of the following dimensions are involved in your regular actions and decisions: (more…)

  • Measuring Career Growth (Financial and Learning goals) – Part II

    This is the follow-up to my last post in which I talked about various measures of career success and the need to prioritize various goals so that trade-offs can be made when time is factored in. In this post, I will focus on two goals and their measures: financial and learning.

    Financial Goals: Even though it may sound trivial or easy, financial goals should still be framed and kept around to make sure you are meeting them. Other than the obvious way of framing the goal (“X % raise over Y years”), you can also frame them in terms of utility of money. (more…)

  • Measuring Career Growth – Part I

    In one of my previous articles, I talked about various measures of success that one can use for their career planning and management. Specifically, I talked about 4 ways:

    1. Financial goals
    2. Learning/competencies goals
    3. Job complexity goals
    4. Career Plan goals

    Note that setting any kind of measurable goal is an exercise in itself (see a series of great posts on Cube Rules about setting SMART goals)

    In this post, I want to talk about time factor which plays an important role in any career plan and measure: (more…)

  • Career Management when you can’t change your company

    I was talking to some of my friends and this question came about: what do I do if I can’t change my company even though my career is stuck here.

    I have observed this many times; discussions about career management (and growth) seem to imply a change in the current company, even though it need not be. However, to be fair, there indeed are many reasons when someone can’t change their current company even when they need to:

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