What Do You Want? - Setting Career Goals and Expectations

One of the most common questions that I receive happen to be about how professionals can manage their careers more effectively. Among my colleagues, peers and friends I am not only very knowledgeable about technology, leadership, and innovation, I also happen to be someone they would seek advice about on their careers.

Recently with the shifts in the marketplace for 2011 where there is a definite up-tick in talent hiring among the companies of the silicon valley, many professionals are wondering if they should be making a move. Hence lots of professionals ask me about my opinion on the matter. 

While there is definitely a surge in hiring, one has to keep in mind that the overall unemployment for our area is still relatively high, about 9-12% or so. Yet it is also true at the same time that there is are a lot of opportunities to be hired and not just at the lower end of the spectrum, but many that are within the $100K+ range. The reason why this is important to keep in mind, is that while there is hiring, it is a specific type of hiring that is occurring since if it were general in nature overall unemployment would be impacted.

So the next logical question which many would naturally go forward with would be something akin to "What opportunities are available?". I instead steer my colleagues to a different question... "What do you want?". This generally catches them off guard with most responding with mild surprise and astonishment. "It should be obvious what I want to do!" is a typical response. So then I ask them to elaborate on this subject since it is not really obvious to me. After several attempts, it becomes increasingly clear that they themselves do not really know either.

This single question is perhaps one of the most important, unanswered and obvious questions to ask for any professional at any stage of their career. It also has to be one of the most frequently asked since rarely if ever are there instances where life situations remain so stable that some degree of reassessment is in order. Most of the time responses fall back to positions such as "I want to be a director!". I simply counter with my standard reply of "Why do you want to be a director?". At this point most professionals are caught off guard, unable to properly articulate their reasoning. Most of the time during their statements it is easy to conclude that they want such a position because "I have earned it." which may or may not be true. Yet their inability to articulate the value of the actual progression in terms of their career is very indicative that they have not thought much about their career goals or plans in general. 

Being a director or a higher rank in a chosen profession can bring any number of benefits such as improving leadership skills, chances to mentor others, learning how the organization functions, making more critical value decisions for the organization, etc. Yet even this gain has to be placed into the perspective of the overall professional's career goals. So using my question of "What do you want?" I help professionals bring focus to their objectives. Is it to learn to be the founder of your company, to better understand making management decisions, to lead teams of people through difficult encounters, to learn new things, to assist others in their career growth? The answers are as varied as are the individual professionals who answer them. 

More importantly since I tend to have a heavy technical focus, the situation is more along the lines of helping professionals understand if they are at a critical decision point; specifically moving away from hands-on technical work to more hands-off duties. For many engineers and technical specialists, getting into the guts of what they do is all they are familiar with. More importantly, depending on the career goals, being hands-on is absolutely critical for continued viability in the marketplace. For example, if a professional wants to pursue a career in building sophisticated toolkits for software engineers, they need to actually construct it. In the silicon valley, it is very common to have unconferences called "Hackathons" where groups of like-minded engineers meet and rally around common themes and produce working products/services/businesses from concepts, usually in under 72 hours.  Being able to participate in such hands-on development is the key to successful career growth. However another approach that is equally valuable is the ability to lead such endeavors leveraging past hands-on experience. Using the same toolkit example, a professional can find themselves collaborating with a team in a leadership role to achieve the same end. 

The key to these outlooks happens to be perspective. Leadership takes a certain skills and effort in addition to any hands-on skills that a professional uses. Most successful professionals become what I call "generalists" in that they have a mixture of skills for a variety of situations making them very effective towards a range of problems. By looking at the evolving nature of one's skills and values over time, a professional can determine based on these changes the ranges of challenges they can tackle and in what manner. These help form the basis of a decision on where to take their careers. Maybe a professional feels more comfortable with certain duties than others, yet only by really focusing on what they want to do now and in the near term, can they start to understand the gap between their current career and where they want to be.

Once the gap has been identified, plans can be made to bridge the gaps such that these professionals can more accurately target their next career opportunity. It is a very large ocean of opportunity. Without focusing on what someone wants, it is almost certainly the opportunities that come their way will be mostly random requiring a lot of effort and energy to sort through it.

In a recent example with a fellow professional, I mentioned how Google was going to hire about 6,000 employees over the course of 2011. Some would be through normal hiring, others through acquisition. Regardless of the method it represents a significant surge in hiring. Many engineers and technical professionals would love to work for Google. So in this conversation I asked how being at Google aligned with their career goals and plans. After a short discussion they came upon the realization that they did not know how such a move would truly benefit them. They thought that reaching Google would be "their ultimate destination". I brought up another perspective that such a move would be the equivalent to getting into a prestigious college: it helps the professional get ready for their next big move. They admitted they had not thought about that.

In the end being able to take advantage of an opportunity is a bit of luck mixed with planning. However many professionals very rarely have anything resembling a plan so they leave it to luck to get by. For as much time as we spend on answering emails, tweeting, facebooking, going to meetings, picking up groceries, getting gas, etc. we need to spend a little time planning for our careers. After all only we cannot really go after something if we do not know what we want. 

Why Companies Lay People Off - Preparing for that Possibility

Through my long career losing one's job is a very traumatic experience to anyone the first time around. It actually gets easier subsequent times since much of the initial shock and pain found in the first layoff has taught a professional how to be better prepared for it.

In the recent economic turmoil many more professionals have found themselves on different paths than what they thought they would experience. For many it is their first time or so long since they have gone through the experience that their pain, confusion and angst is understandably high. Even the most seasoned professional looks at the situation with some degree of frustration and confusion. After all they were doing fairly important work and now suddenly they are out of an organization they have given so much of their efforts to.

I often find myself giving advice to many professionals in these situations from my own personal perspective in that I have gone through it myself several times. Many have found my advice useful so I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the subject:

• Why is a company laying off? Answer - economic reality bites. Let's face it, many companies are not necessarily well prepared for change especially rapid, downward changes. So when they do take actions, it is often more of a reaction than any truly planned action. This is not to say that any organization releases employees lightly. Quite to the contrary they are loathe to do so. However it is not something that they adequately prepare for nor practice until times call for it. Quite simply it is beyond an organization's control on when they lay people off. It just happens.
• So why am I being laid off? Answer - it's nothing personal, it's just business. Most companies view their employees as valuable resources not necessarily as individuals. Even in the most individual-oriented company, everyone has a value that has to be weighed by the company process in terms of being retained or released. For example younger more agile individuals even those who have contributed significantly to a company can find themselves released while others are retained. Why? The company weighs their value to the company. If a person only contributes in a certain way that can be more or less valuable to a company versus others who do more. To be honest there is no real "formula" or "scientific process" being applied. It is matter of perception by decision makers beyond an individuals control.
• Was it something that "I" did to get laid off? Answer - Plain and simply no. In almost all instances of being laid off I can personally recall every "mishap" that might have caused my being released. From personal experience that is the wrong avenue to take. While it is true that one might have made mistakes, if they had been heinous enough to cause a layoff more than likely one would have been released due to disciplinary actions prior to being laid off. One of the biggest wastes of energy is looking at a company and imagining any number of scenarios as to why one was laid off. It ranges from "so-and-so was out to get me", "I should have explained my value more", "I should have done more tasks", etc. I have seen executives of profitable divisions who did outstanding work, engineers with PhDs and patents, and sales personnel who brought large deals to an organization released in the same wave as other professionals who were not as well known. It is never one's fault for being affected by a layoff in such dire economic times. 
• What do I do now? Answer - Simple. Find a new opportunity. Note how I always call it an opportunity and not a job? This is an important distinction. An opportunity is something that interests you whereas a job is something that does not. It is the passion driven by interest that attracts employers. If you are interested in doing something it shows.

One of the major perspectives someone being laid off tends to forget is how their departure among the number of their fellow employees impacts their organization. I am not merely talking about immediate work efforts but rather morale as a whole. How an organization deals with a layoff is not only important to those leaving, but those staying as well. While it is true that many employees will react out of fear of losing their positions, energy that is fear-based lasts only a short while. Employees will become resentful, fearful and stressed resulting in any number of issues to an organization ranging from late projects, to health-related absences, to a poisoning of the company culture - just to name a few. Essentially when a lay off occurs, it erodes the goodwill between employee and employer. How well the transition is managed determines how much erosion occurs and how soon the healing process begins. I often advise those who are let go that their worries are over and their course of action is clear. Those that remain behind are the ones that need sympathy and support as their turmoil will take a long time to settle down.

One of the greatest lessons being laid off teaches a professional is how to be entrepreneurial - to find opportunities, to network, to grow, to find business own their own, to face repeated rejection with optimism and enthusiasm, and to ultimately believe in themselves. As companies continue to lower their costs by letting employees go, they are in my opinion inadvertantly creating a newer, better workfoce that will have several traits:

• More self-reliant and self-motivated.
• More focused on doing what they themselves are capable of doing for others both inside and outside of an organization.
• More confidant in their capabilities and values in delivering quality, affordable and effective solutions to customers.
• More capable of making significant decisions that affect their lives with greater clarity and determination than before.
• More unwilling to "settle" for something as opposed to going out and "making" it happen.

These are not bad traits to have in any employee. It is just that employers will find a more mindful, independent workforce than they previously thought. This workforce will not only have the talent but the the motivation to focus on what interests them. For any professional going through a transition focus on the future, not the past. Trust me, it helps.

Be Passionate - What I Do In My Spare Time?

Everyone winds down in their spare time. They spend time with friends, family and pursuing what they enjoy such as sports, art, music, or any other number of things. When people enjoy what they do you can see it in how they act. They make the time to do it. They work at it very hard and any chance they can get.

In my case that passion is technology. All sorts of technology. This is reflected in my own personal lab space:

• My own personal lab consisting of 6 linux (Ubuntu/CentOS) servers, 3 windows (XP, Vista, 7) workstations, and 2 laptops (1 macbook and 1 linux). I also maintain 1 Android handset, and all 3 versions of the iPhone (2g, 3g and 3gs).
• Virtualization to create on-demand resources on my servers for private clouds and to test dynamic allocations.
• Oracle databases both in standalone and RAC modes used for administration, development and testing. 
• MySQL databases used for administration, development and testing.
• Hadoop instances used for administration, development and testing. 
• Comparison of how the various data solutions (i.e. Oracle, MySQL, Hadoop) stand up and compare to one another for various tasks.
• Search engine technologies using Lucene and Solr on large amounts of data to create new ways to view information and find new insights.
• Create and maintain web browsing and cataloging robots and application servers on data that I like which also serve as a growing test data set for various tasks.
• Creating my own application and request servers using Java, C++, Scala, Python and Ruby. Mostly to see what the strengths and weaknesses of the languages are in terms of their development, maintenance and performance.
• Creating small web applications using PHP and AJAX to produce interfaces to various data sets.
• Create small applications for Android and iPhone to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the various SDKs. 
• Create examples of using incremental innovations based on newer technologies and approaches on typical corporate approaches. This builds on my experience in the field whereby technical staffs can start to tackle some of the newer approaches in an incremental style for themselves.
• Keep basic skills such as administration, scripting, programming, etc. up to date.
• Install, learn and apply new open source projects that sound interesting to me and how they might benefit a company if adopted.

Most of my friends and professional colleagues are always amazed at how much I have and how I apply it. I explain it my passion is the same as any other pursuit. It is constructed over time and in pieces and applied on a consistent basis. It interests me which is the bottom line. In truth creating a small lab like mine is actually pretty inexpensive and can be done quite easily if you know what you are doing. 

So what specifically interests me in technology is how it can help solve problems that have nagged people for a long time whether in a company or not. What is the most frustrating for most people is what I call the domain specific language which confuses everyone. This is the same hurdle encountered in every pursuit; sports has it's own language, so does running, bicycling, martial arts, collecting, etc. Once you decide to commit to something the language and terms should become secondary since you have to explain to the average person what you are doing and why it is important or interesting.

Like anyone who is passionate about anything that interests them, they will find a way to pursue it and excel.