Career In 3 Big C (s) and 3 small c (s)

Growing up in India, I did not hear the term career or career growth or career development. I think it is because everyone I knew worked for the government and the career growth happened with tenure in the job. Nobody talked about career. Since I did an MBA in the US, I have been hearing these terms regularly. Over the years, I am lucky to have worked with a wide variety of people and in management roles, I have been responsible for helping people with their career development. This article is a brief summary of what I have learned about career and career growth. 

Career

There are a variety of ways the term is defined and broadly speaking it means a sequence of jobs a person takes within an industry or a domain. For example, someone can have a career in teaching and teaches all her life to students in different grades. Someone else can have a career in marketing (domain) and spends her life in marketing jobs in multiple industries. When a teacher takes a job as a marketing manager in the tech industry, it is considered a change of career. 

Generally, the career direction begins when you are seventeen or eighteen i.e. when you join college. You are supposed to figure out how to make a living and the kind of work you would like to do when you are a teenager. You can end up in a job different from what you study in college or you can do a masters degree in a domain different from your undergrad to change careers. For example, I studied Electrical Engineering in college and then I did an MBA. 

I advise young people to explore before they settle on a career. 

What do people want from their careers? 

The primary driver is money.  There are three ways to make money: 

1. Job: Work for a company and the company pays you for the work you do. 

2. Entrepreneurship: Create a business that generates money and you get to keep part of the wealth created. 

3. Manage money: You invest your own money or other people’s money in public or private markets and keep all or a part of the wealth appreciation you generated. This could fall under Job or Entrepreneurship but I think managing money is fundamentally different than creating products and services to be consumed by others. 

The idea of career is associated with making money with a job. What one wants from a job beyond money changes with time and with how one’s life evolves. A lot of people are happy making enough money to make a decent living and focus on family life and/or their personal interests. Some people want to make more money for multiple reasons - children's education, increasing family size, better house, better holidays, financial independence, etc. Other people like the work they do and like being recognized for their good work. People you work with play a big role in your job satisfaction. Whatever the reason, I have found that people want three things from their careers (3C): 

1. Compensation (money): People want to make more money. You get more money with promotions or with changing jobs. 

2. Control (freedom and influence): People want to choose who they work with, what they work on, and how they work, freedom to learn things and have new experiences they find interesting. Many people want to go up in the hierarchy and manage bigger organization and/or bigger P&Ls (Profit & Loss centers) to increase their influence in the organization and eventually become the CEO.

3. Credit (Recognition): People want to be recognized for their work and ideas. 

What people want from their careers and how they get it 

How do people get what they want in their careers (career growth)?

How do people achieve the 3C? There are three more c (s) :) 

1. competence (expertise): This can be divided into four categories - domain expertise, organizational expertise, perception management expertise, and feelings management expertise. This is a process of continuous learning. 

2. connections (relationships): Who do you know matters, your visibility in the organization matters, business is a team sport so the wider your network and deeper your relationships, the better you will do. This is a process of always caring and helping others. 

3. chance (luck): A competent person can join Google in early days and become rich or they can join a startup that fails and go broke. In a big company, you could be part of team that launches a new hit product in and you get promoted in a few months or you could be on a team doing the same job with no promotion for years. The more times you try different jobs/teams, the better your chance of success. This is a process of continued trial until you are successful. 

If people know what they want and how they can get it then why are so many people unhappy with their jobs? A lot of people don’t know what they want that causes constant state of anxiety and stress. There is no perfect job and some people never get comfortable with the tradeoffs. For others, it comes down to the feeling stuck i.e. a lifestyle that is dependent on the paycheck and unwillingness to risk it for something new that might offer better Compensation, Credit, or Control. In a way, career growth is like personal wellness. Everyone wants it but most people don’t make the persistent effort required to grow. 

If you do things you enjoy doing, are surrounded by people that you like working with, and don’t lose your enthusiasm for learning from failures then you may or may not get the exceptional big 3Cs (Credit, Compensation, and Control) but you will get better at small 3 c (s) (competence, connections, chance) and you will have less regrets in life.