Stand up and Take charge

Last evening, while at the badminton club I had this discussion with a close friend of mine. He was my colleague at my second job. He had joined as a fresher some 11 years ago, and still continues to work there.
The statement that I made to him was, "People working there have a good job with great pay packages, but rarely anyone made a good career."
What he is doing now, is more or less the same as what he was doing when he was having 2 years of experience. And this made him feel less confident about himself. 

I must admit that I learnt almost all my technical skills, confidence about coding and perseverance while working here. This was largely due to the tough working conditions and the highly competitive nature of people working around me.

But how to build one's career, and how to grow, these I learnt in my brief stint at IBM. 

Right on the first day of my joining, at the pre-induction speech, an industry leader made this statement to all of us, 

"You are responsible for your career. You have to stand up and take charge"

This was something that I had never thought of, in the 11 years before that.
Reminded me of these lines from Pink Floyd's song Time, 

"... and then one day you find that ten years have got behind you,
No one told you when to run,
You missed the starting gun..." 

Based on my experience there, I could find at least three ways to help build a good career.

Career conversation with your manager.
As a professional it's my responsibility to setup a regular meeting with my manager and find out how I am doing and also let know of my needs and aspirations.
I'm lucky that some of my managers have been really good at this, even in my present organization.

Find a mentor.
It's extremely important that you find someone who's been there, done that. Someone whom you would look up to.

Approach someone you can trust and confide in. He/she may even say no, but may help you in finding a mentor. The mentoring may not be even a formal one. 

Find something that suits both, and works for you.

At best, someone with slightly higher experience than you can be a good buddy - a best friend at work, but never a mentor.

My own manager told me that one should avoid having their own manager as mentor. That's a potential conflict of priorities.

Learn from people around you.
As a budding architect, I was really lucky to work with some of the best architects across 2 business groups. I could gain a lot from their experience. Driving meetings, conference calls and negotiating with tough clients being the most notable of them.
I still get to learn a lot from my peer managers, and my immediate next level managers every day, in every way possible. 

At IBM, I was also training batches of graduate hires and inducting the good ones into projects in my group. But after a year into the projects, only a small handful of these actually did well. The rest simply fell into a bottomless well called mediocrity. They simply found their way into the crowd.

And this is true in many organizations and at all levels today, more so in the Indian context.

Insufficient technical competence may be a reason in some cases, but skills can always be learnt. Attitude, is not so easy.

To be honest, many don't know what their priorities at work should be. 

Some spend way too much time chilling out, just because the system allows them to do so.
In all the foreign cultures that I've worked in, be it east or west, people who spend a lot of time on personal calls at work are generally looked down upon. 

In the Indian context, we may not look down upon our colleagues, but certainly wont miss opportunities in making snide and loose comments on their backs.

Some people take their jobs as a mundane 9 to 6 job. By that, I don't necessarily mean that one must stay late in office, to give that visibility to their bosses.

What I meant to says is, if at any time, work is becoming routine and predictable, one must take it as an early warning and start to look for new challenges at work. 

A famous man once said, "We Indians get easily discouraged by setbacks." And he is absolutely right.

When faced with setbacks, some people tend to lose their enthusiasm, energy and passion.  Then it becomes a mundane 9 to 6 job, and people tend to go through the motions, meekly accepting what's thrown at them. 

It's important to get back up and take charge again.

For one to build a good career, undoubtedly the foundation also needs to be strong. 

Reasonably good technical skills, consistency, sincerity, hard work and unwavering focus are utmost essential. Of course, you need to be prepared to put in whatever effort it takes to be at the place where you want to go.

There are some who take the option of bullshitting their way up. Just remember, "you only know who's swimming naked when the tide goes out". Sooner or later, their luck will run out.

Whichever approach you choose, you must always keep checking if you are headed in the right direction.

Ultimately its your career. You must stand up and take charge of it.