2023 Career Progression!
Going back to that same old routine in 2023? Why not kickoff the NEW YEAR with a tangible action plan for yourself? And, this could work well irrespective of the position/ org./ profession you're in.
Thoughts & Triggers!
Ever felt like you’re stuck in your jobs / more importantly “the job role” as it feels like you are doing the same thing in and out like clockwork on a daily basis?
And over an odd weekend you meet some long-lost friend from school who started out his career alongside you some years back and you can’t help but notice a wide visible gap to both your positions in the hierarchy now, over that question, “So, what are you up to now?” seeming nothing less than a haunting.
Which ought to bring you to a few questions post introspection:
For most people working in a corporate setup these questions are banal, and it could strike the others like powerful bolts of thunder over such odd meetings. But that sinking feeling is certainly very common, a main contributor of which could be “the herd mentality”.
“If you don’t stand up for yourself, what you believe in & what you want, nobody else will do it for you!”
So, the truth of the matter is it’s all in your hands.
But also on the flip side, another bit of the truth is, all of that is also going to need lots of planning, progressively and stage-wise.
Planning Progressively!
Yes, planning is crucial and it would work well if it is done over phases. But, for planning to become successful it would often take a few retrospectives / self-evaluation over various stages, sans which one’d only be building air castles.
“Self-evaluation ought to be put into regular practice for it is very possible that some of your greatest strengths could turn into liabilities over a period of time totally dependent on your current position & there is no other better gift that you could possibly give yourself than to identify those negatives & weed all of them out”.
Self-Evaluation:
There is nothing of a method that could bring about a massive overnight change in anyone. It ought to be understood that it is a slow process and making it a steady one would work in your favor, which could be realized over these steps:
a detailed assessment of where you stand today
researching, digesting & scoping the multivariate possibilities thereof
deciding / fixing on a goal & setting clear sight on it
breaking it down into long-term, short-term / interim goals so as to make it more feasible to accomplish
The power of self-evaluation is indeed amazing and the outcome of which ought to be “a clear goal in sight, a stepwise understanding of how you’re going to progress, a clear action-plan” if you will.
An analogy:
Rewind your lives back to the time you started off in elementary school & am sure you’ve heard “the ant & the grasshopper” story.
The grasshopper being much more advanced a species blessed with a few powers like size, power of flight, speed, a well developed nervous system in comparison to the ant, suffered the curse of possessing a myopic (“living for today”) vision as he wasn’t wired to think about the future & did struggle to make ends meet when the weather turned harsh.
On the other hand the ant was wired towards absolute dedicated hard work & more importantly planning in advance for harsh weather where things could go out of hand owing largely to its size & the lack of anatomy to withstand it all.
The learning of course from that story was proper planning for the future & making the best use of your most important asset – “TIME”.
Drill down over Self-evaluation:
The success criteria of a self-evaluation exercise ought to be a clear earmarked goal in sight and a stepwise understanding of how you’re going to progress over what’d be a workable action-plan.
Also, when individuals do spend time with internal teams over discussing, brainstorming, planning out how they’re going to meet those high-level objectives, why can’t all that be applied to one’s personal self?
So, here is list of 9 parameters that one ought to be absolutely clear with, in order to make any worthwhile progress:
⚠️Announcement - !!WATCH OUT!!
My thread for this week would cover:
“LONG TERM GOAL - To grow into a successful PM by EOY 2023”
which is used as an example in the table above to describe those 9 parameters & that would be hitting Twitter this Saturday, 5:00 PM IST alongside other social networking platforms in due course.
Plotting all those over what could be thought of as a modified version of a GANTT chart, this is roughly what that annual planner targeting your career progression ought to look like now:
💡 PRO TIP:
Given today’s way of the world and how being open to change / fluid is considered the best approach, it certainly doesn’t work that way with Goals. When the long-term goal ought to be defined unambiguously & clearly, the short-term goals or the alternate routes could still be open to some bit of experimentation, learning, factoring, changing so as to target optimization.
Having aspirations is what makes us human, but that'd never suffice.
Making it to that A-list needs smart work to bridge gaps between dreams & reality.
Let's now build an annual plan for 2023 over a case study.
Here's the link: https://typefully.com/BgpInv/0d7LBOc
#productmanagement #annualplan #planning #prodmgmt