I am talking about a topic which is relevant and has implication for both employee and employer. Let us dwell on the topic of Career. In a conventional enterprise life cycle, an employee depends upon his employer and his/her manager to plot a career for him/her and walk that path.

The question is while the manager can certainly guide, where does the primary responsibility lie today? Indeed, it is with the employee oneself. In a modern disruptive world of today, one has got to constantly act and deal with career direction and keep navigating. The manager is like GPRS navigation who can guide and show the path and the time it takes ideally to reach the targeted destination. But the employee who is seeking direction and is on the wheels has quite a few options to choose from depending upon the GPRS prediction experience and reality seen at that point of time. How many of us dare to challenge the GPRS system of navigation in our real life experience?

In enterprises of today, the ideal destination for oneself is known and targeted by less than 5% of the population. Instead they are looking for experiences and actually looking at building “career transformation”. More than 80% of them do not relate to the classical career tracks and career maps the way we define them in our employee life cycle. The whole USP of careers seem to have changed and a set of new fundamentals have come in, which needs to be answered:

  • Relevance of my current role to myself and to the company.
  • WIIFM and my organisation if I do well in this role and contribute (Note: they are not talking of performance but instead contribution)
  • I want to be part of a winning team.
  • I am not seeking a long term career but this role is a milestone in my overall journey of life.
  • I seek a good experience and not planning a career.
  • Am I contributing to the world at large?
  • Am I making a difference to all those around me?
  • I have many stakeholders in my role and my appraisal is done just by my manager which is not fair. All those impacted / effected need to say what has been my contribution to their success.

In summary, the following 2 points are standing out as relevant in today’s world:

  • Need of conventional career tracks and plotting an ideal journey losing relevance.
  • Stacks of experiences and career transformation opportunities which will precede over notional promotion, acceleration and developmental effort.

Not closing this debate for now and let this be a continued discussion….