Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

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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.

  • My manager left, and the new manager doesn’t like me! What now?

    Be careful in jumping to conclusions early enough, otherwise you will jeopardize your career. When you get a new manager, it is important to be willing to make some adjustments. Your relationship with your manager impacts career the most. This relationship will be built only when you and your manager know enough about each other and act on them. Since it is your career that is at stake, it is important that you make sure that your manager knows you well, in addition to you knowing her well.

    Make sure you know these things about your manager:

    • Her career goals and motivations
    • Her leadership style
    • Her personality traits.

    Also make sure your manager knows these things about you:

    • Your preferred working style
    • Your past manager’s style
    • Your career goals and motivations

    Once these knowledge sharing sessions are done, you can proceed to observe your manager and yourself in action to make sure both are behaving in a manner discussed in the sessions to know each other. Talk more if you have to.

  • How should I measure my performance?

    Typically, employees rely on their manager’s feedback, performance review feedback and salary hikes to decipher whether they are growing enough. However, most of these attributes are not controlled by the employee and these attributes can change without any change in the employee’s performance (for example, if budget is cut, salary hike could be 0, this doesn’t mean lack of performance). Therefore, we recommend two other measures to be added to the mix of self-performance measures: learning and job complexity. If learning goals are met/exceeded, there is a good chance that career is growing too. Similarly, working in a highly complex/challenging job environment is a good sign of career growth.

  • Why should I take initiatives at workplace?

    Taking initiative is about picking up organizational challenges to solve without being asked and delivering results. Taking initiative is one of the best ways to achieve stardom at workplace. If you are interested in growing your career in the current company, you must take initiatives. Even when you don’t feel passionate about the organization or your manager to take initiative, do it for the selfish reason of your career growth and development.

    However, when you take some initiative at your workplace, ensure these things:

    1. Identify right problems to solve
    2. Have clear goals and measures of success
    3. Make sure you can produce results (from ability and organization perspective)
    4. Build and maintain credibility (so that others can help you succeed).

  • Career Coaching

    Introduction

    Career coaching doesn’t need to be only for C-level executives, CareerBloom makes high-quality coaching accessible to all working professionals. If you are a working professional, now you have a real chance to actualize your talent potential and be extremely successful in your career.

    Career Coaching Philosophy

    CareerBloom offers career coaching to working professionals and help them discover their career goals, plan their career journey, and be effective at workplace, thereby achieving long term career success. We offer issue-based tactical coaching as well as proactive and strategic coaching to prepare the ground for future career success.
    A successful and long-lasting career requires 3 ingredients:

    1. Self-awareness and awareness of goals
    2. A high level plan for career path and a list of career milestones
    3. Effective execution of career plan – moving fast and in the right direction (what we call ‘Career Velocity’) at workplace

    At CareerBloom, we call these Discover, Plan and Work phases.

    Discover

    • Interests and Passion
    • Strengths and Weaknesses
    • Life and Career Goals

    Plan

    • Career Path and Milestones
    • Learning Goals
    • Career Success Metrics

    Work

    • Workplace Issues Resolution
    • Effective and Efficient
    • Jobs and Roles Upgrade

    Our offerings focus on each of these phases. Review our services offering and pick the service that works best for you.

  • Entrepreneurship – Fear of Failure

    I want to be an entrepreneur, but what if I fail?

    Over last 6 months, We have met a large number of smart technology professionals who have stated the above. The positive thing is that there is an entrepreneurial energy flowing around, which is great for the individual and their companies (and of course the country). However, second part of the question is disheartening because it shows a lack of understanding about how entrepreneurship works and what does it take to be one.

    Entrepreneurship is risky by design

    Entrepreneurship is about taking risks. Wherever there is a risk, by definition, it means there is a chance of failure. Your goal as an entrepreneur should be to reduce the probability of that event by doing research, partnerships, planning, phased execution, etc. but you can’t eliminate the risk. If you have fear of failure, job is probably the best thing for you.

    Entrepreneurship is calculated risk

    Entrepreneurship is not like jumping into a cold, shark-infested ocean without preparation and hope for the best. There are ways to experiment with your career that help you get ready for this event, as well as prove to yourself whether entrepreneurship is for you:

    1. Startup within the company – Join a group just starting in your company. Or propose your idea to the head of your business unit and maybe you will get to drive a new project
    2. Advise Startups – Join the board of a small startup and/or offer your (free) advice/consultation
    3. Join a startup – In the space you are interested and want to be an entrepreneur in

    Turn unknown into a learning goal

    Fear of unknown is what scares us into mediocrity most of the time. However, many such unknowns (like ‘I don’t know whether I can do a startup’) can be converted into a learning goal (‘Let me learn about what is required to do a startup’). This converts a ‘can’t do’ situation into a ‘can do’ one, which is much more positive and inspiring.

    Network and Learn

    Talking to same people all the time (your lunch groups, your buddies from college, etc.) doesn’t give different solutions. Expand your network and let fresh ideas flow in. Surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do, talk to people who know more about what you want to do, and learn from them. Join local networking groups like TiE, Startup Weekend, etc.

    CareerBloom helps in Entrepreneurship planning

    Entreprenurship, like any other change in career, require careful planning, consideration of risk, and diligent project management to continuously reduce risks by working on uncovering unknowns. It is nothing to be afraid of if you have figured out that you do want to be an entrepreneur.

    CareerBloom can help you in many ways in starting your entrepreneurial journey. Schedule an appointment with us.

  • Job Change Strategies

    I want to change jobs, but I am unable to get right offers

    Changing jobs is one of the few times when we spend quality time thinking about our career. Unfortunately, most of this time is spent in tactically looking for a job, rather than strategizing about career and job. This results in a sub-optimal job search, and you end up with no or very small number of offers, and none of them seem right for you.

    Strategic Job Search

    The solution is to search for the job in the right way. There are many ways, one of the ways we have seen work well in our experience relies on COAST framework. It consists of following steps:

    • Conception: Identify the need for a change and making sure right goals exist for making change. Clarity of these career goals are essential to be successful at getting right job offers.
    • Organization: This phase is about doing research about roles, companies, hiring managers, domain, etc. so that you know the right roles and companies to target. This is also about preparing yourself, including your resumes, interviewing skills, your online presence (LinkedIn for example), etc.
    • Application: Application phase is all about how to do your best in interviewing, how you learn from failures to do better at next set of interviews, and do all you can to get an offer from the companies you want.
    • Selection: This phase is about picking the right offer so that you don’t have to come back in the job market soon.
    • Transition: This phase is about doing the transition successfully, so that you can quickly establish yourself on a career growth trajectory which was the goal of this job change.

    There are many other strategies to go about doing a job search, important thing is to pick something and stick to it.

     

  • Managing Career Proactively

    I feel my career is going nowhere and my peers are growing fast.

    This is not a comment you hear from people many times, but most people have it in their mind.

    Career Hopelessness

    There are many reasons why someone may feel this way. Here are some reasons we have seen in the past:

    1. Performance Review – Your performance review (and associated raise) hasn’t been great for last few times.
    2. Boring projects – You have been working on projects which doesn’t challenge you enough and you feel bored.
    3. Lack of passion – You are not passionate about the industry/domain/role that you work in
    4. Lack of perspective – You only look at the star performers around you
    5. Goal Clarity – You are not sure what you want to achieve in your career.

    Resolution – Career and Goal Review

    When you are faced with this situation, following these steps:

    1. Review goals and milestones – Slow down and take stock of your career. The first thing you should do is to spend some time in rediscovering your career goals and milestones and make sure you understand your them and are working towards them.
    2. Evaluate Career Trajectory – In the hectic pace at workplace, sometimes, without our realization, our career trajectory deviates from our career goals. Many times, this happens when you keep doing what the company and your manager ask you to do, without thinking much about what you want to do.
    3. Identify alignment issues – When you spend time analyzing your career trajectory and career goals, you can identify lack of alignment between the two. In this case, you need to work with your manager to see if you can align your career goals with organizational goals. Most of the time, if you have a good manager, it is possible to do so.
    4. Fix alignment issues – You can fix many alignment issues by changing your project with the help of your manager. In the cases where it is not possible, it may be time for a bigger change – in role, company, or even domain. It depends on source and extent of mis-alignment.

     

  • How I earned my Independence

    Today is Indian Independence Day, and so the idea of this post is to recap my experience over last 6 months when I gained my independence – moving from working for others to working for myself. It is a long story but I will try to keep it short. Anyone interested in the details behind the points should feel free to contact me. I hope this post nudges a few of you forward, in putting that last ounce of doubt away and become independentJ.

    Even though there are many risks in being independent, they essentially boil down to 3 questions:

    • Do I have enough saving to last 12 months without any earning?
    • Do I believe passionately in the idea that I want to pursue?
    • Will I learn more than my peers even when I fail in my ‘independence’ march? (more…)

  • News Review: Engagement and Retention challenges

    It has been a while since I posted here. I have been extremely busy with lots of interesting things happening with me, and I am enjoying my unemployment thoroughly. I have met lots of interesting people over last few months, including a large number of working professionals who are trying to make changes to their career to zoom ahead. I will post some of my insights from them in a later post, but today I wanted to comment on various news articles I read in Indian business newspapers within few days of each other (Jul 11-13, 2012).

    Engagement and retention are issues that organizations are increasingly grappling with. Half of the employees leaving within 5 years may not sound very scary, but organizations which rely on their stars to save the day and carry the mediocres along can’t afford to lose 50% of those stars even in a period as long as 5 years. The churn of workforce in India is at all levels (35% have less than 2 years tenure and a 3rd executives planning to change office within 2 years) and one-third think they are not allowed to perform to their potential because of organizational issues. Overall, this doesn’t paint a good picture about Indian Industries and their future. As I have maintained all along, one of the key drivers for engagement is the perception about organization’s willingness and efforts to address career development needs for the employees. Indian companies tend to pay only lip service to this (canned training, manager’s trainings) rather than offer customized and targeted career solutions, at least to their star employees. (more…)

  • Why do we work – When individuals care about careers

    In my last post on when organizations care about careers, I talked about various things an organization can do in order to utilize their employees effectively and in the process, help employees realize their career goals.

    However, not all companies care about careers, and when they don’t, individuals suffer. It is essential for everyone to be focused on their own career goals and manage the career proactively, with or without explicit support from the organization. In a previous post last year (managing career proactively), I described a process to do this. In this post, I want to highlight a few of the areas that individuals should target.

    1. Create and manage personal performance management system – External indicators of high performance include bonus, raise, promotion, rewards, etc., all of which depend on availability of budget. Therefore, absence of such indicators (for example, no raise company-wide because economy is in bad shape) can’t be taken to be a low performance indicator. Reverse is also true: a solid raise (just because company did well and economy is going strong) doesn’t always indicate a particularly high performance. However, many individuals are unable to keep this distinction clear in their head and end up getting a false notion of career growth (or lack of it). It is important for individuals to create their own measures of their performance and use it over a period of time. Learning goals (and their attainment) are usually the best indicators of career growth, but other measures can be used too, as long as the variables are in your control. (more…)