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.

  • Happiness and Career Success

    It is obviously true that success will bring happiness, any kind of success will. However, is the reverse true – will happiness bring success? There is lots of research available that suggest that happiness indeed brings success. Here are a few references:

    1. Happiness brings success, not the other way round‘ (the paper) – Scientists reviewed 225 studies involving 275,000 people and found that chronically happy people are in general more successful in their personal and professional lives. Happy people are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health and even a long life.
    2. ‘Happiness leads to Career Success‘ talks about the book (The Happiness Advantage) from Shawn Achor that suggest that when we are happy our brain works better and we end up working harder which then leads to success.
    3. People who are unhappy in life are unlikely to find satisfaction at work
    4. Wall Street Journal (‘Is Happiness Overrated’) distinguishes between ‘hedonic well-being’ (immediate pleasure) and ‘eudemonic well-being’ (long term sense of fulfillment) and suggests that latter type of happiness brings the benefits of happiness (health and longevity).
    5. ‘Happiness Lengthens life‘ suggests that ‘Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against falling ill. As a result, happy people live longer. The size of the effect on longevity is comparable to that of smoking or not’.

    If this is true, why have I found so many unhappy people at workplace? (more…)

  • Conducting a job search – Selection and Transition Phases

    This post is final part of the series of posts I am doing on ‘Job Search – Strategies that work better‘. Last post concluded my comments on strategies to apply in order to get lots of job offers from the companies you want. In this post, I want to focus on Selection and Transition phases of the COAST framework that I presented earlier. Note that this post is written in a more prescriptive manner than others, because this topic is more vague than others in Job Search category and hence my hope is I can offer some specific suggestions and opinions.

    There are 2 reasons I want to focus on these:

    1. These are not considered part of a typical job search and hence don’t get enough attention from job hunters or from those who help job hunters.
    2. Decisions made in these phases determine when you have to start your next job search, and wrong decisions bring you to job market much earlier than you want.

    Here is the description of these 2 phases: (more…)

  • Conducting a Job Search – Social and Project Strategies

    This post is part of the series of posts I am doing on ‘Job Search – Strategies that work better‘. In my last post, I talked about 5 phases of job search and how competitive strategies can be applied to each of these phases. Briefly, the phases are: Conception, Organization, Application, Selection and Transition.

    In this post, I will talk about how other strategies can be applied. As one of the commenters on my previous post mentioned, there is no silver bullet and the best strategy is to mix-and-match strategies that work for you. I will specifically focus on social strategies and project management strategies that can be applied to a job search. These can be used separately or together with the competitive strategies, depending on your needs.

    Social strategies model job search as a match-making where the goal is to have a best fit between job hunter and recruiter based on information gathering and sharing. Social and networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are great places to hunt information as well as people (since all information is not captured on internet).

    Project management strategies model job search as a project with clear goals, milestones, resources, and timelines that need to be tracked well. Information and Risk management are important aspects here, and strategies focus on how to do it better.

    Here are some of the strategic principles that are applicable to most of the phases of job search:

    1. Information Presentation: Information presentation refers to various ways (more…)

  • Conducting a Job Search – Competitive Strategies

    In my previous post Job Search – Strategies that work better, I described how people tend to do job search without specific strategy in mind and then suffer, either by spending longer than they should in job search or, worse, not getting the job they want. I also talked about 3 views that can be applied to a strategic job search: Competitive, Social and Project Management.

    In this post, I want to focus on how some of these strategies can be applied to a typical job search.I continue to use the strategic framework that is developed for business competition to job search, so most most of the references below go back to businesses. Also, this topic is too large to be covered in a few posts, so I have tried to be brief and not verbose. I invite comments on some of those areas and I can expand those later.

    Also, please keep in mind that a strategy is only worth so much, execution is way more important; it is good to keep in mind this quote by Edison: “Strategy is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration”. My usage of word strategy includes a healthy dose of perspiration, because otherwise nothing will work.

    In any job change, following phases are involved:

    1. Conception: Identify the need for a change and making sure right goals exist for making change. As one of the comments on the previous post suggested, (more…)

  • Job Search – Strategies that work better

    How do you change a job? Here is the case in front of me (and this is typical of so many examples I have seen):

    1. He wants to get into a new job that gives good role, company has good culture, it leverages all the strengths the person has.
    2. His modus operandi is something like this:
      1. Update the resume
      2. Post in couple of job portals
      3. Get in touch with some of the past contacts (previous bosses and peers primarily), and solicit their help in changing the job
      4. Wait for interview calls and attend them as they come
    3. When you ask ‘why you want to change the job’, there are no clear answers and he doesn’t display any sense of urgency.

    I have now seen enough job hunters who engage in such an important career-impacting activity with such a passivity and unclear reasons. Most of the times, their only strategy to job search is ‘hope’. This bothers me a lot because careers take extremely important detours when jobs are changed. The person must be very clear about the objectives of the change, as well as stay active and engaged in the process to ensure that they stay in the driver’s seat and make it a career-enhancing move. Being successful in a new company is hard and takes time, so one should try to achieve career growth while being in the company (having done multiple role and geographical moves in both big and small companies in my career, I can assure you that this is one of the best ways of growing career). If job change does seem warranted, (more…)

  • Indian students in US – comparison with UK and Australia

    In my previous post ‘Foreign students in US – China, India, South Korea’, I made the point that India is seeing a downward trend in terms of graduate students over last 3-4 years (while undergraduate has grown slightly), while China has been accelerating at a rapid pace in both graduate and undergraduate. Here is a comment I got on the Indian phenomenon:

    “I wonder how the trend would be if you were to include Indian students going to other foreign destinations such as Australia, UK etc. May be coming to US has flattened due to tighter visa policy and grim job prospects. Just a thought. ”

    This is a very good point. So I tried to look at UK and Australia data. Strangely (but maybe not so strangely), India doesn’t have such data easily available for its own students, so I had to go look for Australian and UK sources. For Australia, I used Australian Education International‘s site, which has tons of data, and a very handy pivot table available with exactly the data I needed. For UK, I leveraged data available from Higher Education Statistics Agency which publishes (and sells) this data. I had to read through the press releases to get the summary data for China, India and South Korea that I was looking for.

    Interestingly, South Korea doesn’t figure in top 10-15 countries which send students to UK, I don’t know why that would be the case. For Australia, South Korea was in top 3, the way it was for US.

    Also, both these countries had undergraduate and graduate data combined. Here is what the trend looks like: (more…)

  • Foreign students in US – China, India, South Korea

    Someone forwarded this article from New York Times: Getting Ahead in India Means Getting Out of Town. Here are some excerpts from the article:

    “… is among a rising number of students in India’s rapidly expanding younger population who want, and can pay for, a better education. Yet they know that in a country where thousands apply for each spot at a handful of top universities, the chances of this happening are remote. These students say a good foreign degree will get them a better job and a better life. And if the potential return on investment appears worthwhile, they will put their money on it”

    “… the number of Indian students going overseas annually has doubled in the past six years, reaching more than 200,000”

    The fact that the education in India at this level lacks in quality is a well-known problem. However, just so you understand the scale, consider this: India produced 400,000 technology graduates and 2.5 million general college graduates (75% of former and 90% of latter are unable to find work – When More is Worse). So we are talking about 7% of graduates coming out of India universities. Story of rest of 93% is much less glamorous – most of these are about sub-par skills and scarcity of jobs in India.

    To understand this data about students going to US for higher studies, I also looked at past trends (thanks to Open Doors Data) to understand this phenomenon better. Here are some interesting findings I had: (more…)

  • Being effective – Prioritization and Judgment

    This post is the last of the series of posts I am doing on Being Effective at workplace.

    Prioritization is about working on things that are most important (and not merely most urgent) for the organization and for self. Judgment is about making decisions at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons. Making good judgment and being able to prioritize the work correctly greatly aid the effectiveness of people. Prioritization allows one to focus on a few important things and deliver results, rather than spreading the energy too thin on too many things. Judgment allows one to make right decisions at the right time, even with incomplete data, and complete the work in time.

    Prioritization

    For effective people, prioritization is all about alignment. Here are some of the tenets of effective prioritization I have seen practiced:

    • Understanding goals and objectives of the organization/team: Priorities of work must be aligned with organizational goals and objectives. Depending on the work and scope of influence someone has, this may mean team level, department level, or organization level. To achieve this alignment, these goals and objectives must be understood well. This is not as easy as it sounds. Organizational goals are usually stated more generic manner (‘increase revenue by 30%’) than what is usable. Effective people constantly try to interpret them and also use behaviors of senior management to understand these objectives better (‘actions speak louder than words’). (more…)

  • Being Effective at Workplace – Collaboration

    This post is a part of the series of posts I am doing on Being Effective at workplace.

    Collaboration is the act of working with others, usually without having formal authority over them, to produce a result. Collaborating is an act of free will, which means people cannot be forced to collaborate. This also means that producing results out of a collaboration can be very hard and very dependent on how the collaborators choose to act.

    As I discussed in ‘Taking Initiatives‘ post, for effective people, success depends a lot on how they work with others without having formal authority over them. Hence collaboration is an important activity and being effective at collaboration is an essential goal for them. There are 3 aspects of effective collaboration that I want to talk about in this post.

    Influencing and Persuasion Skills

    Since leader of the collaborating team doesn’t have formal authority, it is obvious they need to show influencing and persuasion skills in order to get results. These are well-researched topic (see couple of these: The Art of Woo and Exerting Influence Without Authority). To summarize, these are some of the key points to keep in mind when you employ these skills in a collaboration setting: (more…)

  • Being Effective at workplace – Taking Initiatives

    Being Effective at workplace – Taking Initiatives

    initiativeThis post is a part of the series of posts I am doing on Being Effective at workplace.

    Taking initiative is about picking up organizational challenges to solve without being asked and delivering results. Taking initiative is a well-known way to achieve stardom at workplace. A FastCompany article has this to say from the book How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed:

    For stars, initiative generally has four elements: It means doing something above and beyond your job description. It means helping other people. Usually it involves some element of risk-taking. And when you’re really taking initiative, it involves seeing an activity through to completion.

    Here are a couple of other rules about initiative: First, before you take on anything new, make sure that you’re doing your assigned job well. Second, remember that social initiatives don’t count for much. Organizing the company picnic or a blood drive won’t get you the kind of recognition you want. They’re fine things to do – but do them because they bring you satisfaction. Third, the kind of initiatives that matter to your career are those that relate to the company’s critical path. Find out what promotes the company’s core mission, and tie your initiatives to it.

    However, taking initiative is hard:

    • Since it is taking something beyond your regular work, it requires extra time investment which few people seem to have in today’s busy organizations.
    • It requires risk taking and results may not always be there, so an organization too focused on fixing problems and eradicating failure may actually penalize initiative-takers in many cases. (more…)