|
 Professionals
today are waking up to the fact that they cannot entrust their career
to one single company. They are also realising that they will retain
their current job only as long as the employer needs their skills,
after which one has to fend for oneself, writes MOHAN BABU
Interestingly, the ‘new’ professional
trends we are seeing are almost similar to historic vocations of
the yore. If we were to go back a century, almost everyone—from
the village potter, carpenter and teacher to the moneylender, landlord
and farmer—was the master of his or her destiny. The ‘professional’
realised that the market dictated the demand and it was their responsibility
to cater to that demand. Of course, most individuals were not educated
about market theory of demand and supply, and it sometimes took
a generation or two for them to realise that they were not meeting
the needs of the market. If people were going to a nearby town to
get fancy shoes, the village cobbler was sometimes not quick to
realise the cause and was unable or unwilling to react to the changing
market condition by altering the design of the shoes he made.
Professionals of today’s generation
have the benefit of hindsight, along with a really powerful tool—information.
Market conditions, emerging trends and information about changes
in technologies are commonly available to anyone who wants to know;
information is literally a fingertip away, thanks to the Internet.
Armed with information and knowledge about changes and emerging
trends, professionals can better position themselves to be prepared
to take charge of their careers and chalk out a growth path regardless
of the organisation they work for.
What does this mean to you?
Most professionals are already realising
that they need to take active charge of the direction in which their
careers are headed. Whether one views a career a series of gigs
or a mix of traditional career with moonlighting, it is the responsibility
of the individual to remain in control. Regardless of the vocation
of one’s choosing—Technology, Medicine, Law, Finance,
Academia or Management—individuals are expected to take active
charge of their careers. Companies of the twenty-first century are
going to value people based on what they bring to the project, assignment
or work-task, rather than the number of years they spent on the
job.
Having worked in India, England and the
US, for Fortune 500 organisations and consultancies, I get a distinct
feeling that no human resources department, manager or boss is going
to nurture my career. In a dynamic corporate world, I don’t
even foresee many companies lasting the length of my productive
work-life. Even if I wanted to, I could not entrust my career to
one single company since corporations are regularly evolving and
transforming, getting acquired, sold, acquiring newer units, sometimes
going bankrupt. I also realise that I will retain my current job
as long as the employer needs my skills, after that I will have
to fend for myself. Most of my peers and professionals of our generation
are waking up to this reality too.
In essence, being a professional is synonymous
with being an entrepreneur. As professionals in an emerging workforce
with evolving
expectations of employer-employee relationship,
most of us will need to acquire entrepreneurial and business management
skills. This is because career trajectories are going to depend
on constant marketing rather than being in a ladder or career track.
Just like lawyers and doctors in private practice manage their careers
like a business because their sustenance depends on constant networking
and marketing, professionals in other vocations too need to learn
entrepreneurial skills.
Perhaps the best entrepreneur one can learn
from is a CEO, a person who rises to the top of his organisation
and leads myriad business units towards a common goal. An increasing
number of successful professionals are borrowing the same basic
guidelines that entrepreneurs and CEOs adopt. In other words, professionals
are starting to think like CEOs of their career corporations.
In the past four columns we looked at the
fundamental shift from an Organisation Man to a Free Agent. The
sooner individuals realise the impact of such a shift, the better
equipped they will be to address it themselves. Some of the ideas
presented in this series may be a bit unconventional and I would
love to exchange notes with readers about this and other trends.
Mohan Babu is a US based software consultant
trying to find the ‘sweet spot’ where IT meets business.
E-mail: mohan@garamchai.com
|
