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). [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

Financial goals
Learning/competencies goals
Job complexity goals
Career Plan goals

Note that setting any kind of measurable goal is an exercise in itself (see a series of great posts on Cube [...]

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 [...]

Industry newbie as a manager – Disaster in making?

One of the comments on the post ’How fast can a career move in India?‘ went like this:
You have not expanded on why getting into a management role early in one’s career will be a disaster.
One of the reasons I can think of is that a newbie (comparatively) has not seen and experienced the varied kinds of environments [...]

Leveraging social networks for career growth

Recently I have been interested in tracking problems and solutions to social networking and its impacts. I wrote about some of the social networking lessons sometime back. However, a recent incident sparked the thought again that social networks are a powerful phenomenon for professional life and career moves, and it can be dangerous to ignore.
I casually asked a [...]

How fast can a career move in India?

Interesting read, this article on rediff. Good examples of how busineess is reacting to the changing changing face of careerist youth in India. The article does note an important point:
Still, there are plenty of tensions between companies and young employees. Many Indian engineers are fascinated with cutting-edge technologies, yet much of the work for clients calls [...]

Career Management in India – guest posts on CubeRules

Cube Rules is a blog where Scott Herrick discusses the perspective of the ‘cubicle warriors’, his blog is aptly named ‘Career Management for Cubicle Warriors‘. Recently, I got a chance to do couple of guest posts there around career management in India (Thanks Scott!). In an attempt to do justice to the topics I chose, I [...]