You own your career and have the best interest in being successful. Everyone should be the primary force behind planning their own career and putting enough thought towards reaching their goals. Your managers can and should help and guide you in planning but they cannot be responsible for it.
Six areas that will help advance and plan your career are:
Here are some thoughts on each one of these areas:
Developing a vision for yourself will help you determine a clear destination and direction. A Personal Vision will also assist you in avoiding detours from your overall career goals which will get you to your destination faster. It will help you make decisions about projects, jobs, and skills that will assist you in achieving your goals. Here are tips to help with the long-term planning and the achievement of your goals:
· Set Goals Aligned to Your Division - Seek to understand the hard customer or engineering issues facing your Division and align your goals with solutions to those issues. Addressing things that are of upmost importance to your team and larger group will get more visibility and advance your career faster.
- Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) - Create a long term goal to develop expertise in a critical area that you are passionate about. Experts in key areas get the best assignments, enjoy their work more than others, and advance quickly in their careers.
- Be Patient and Work On It! - People become passionate about areas that they understand in great depth. It takes time to reach this level of depth. Grow expertise gradually. Every day counts! Improve your skills, execution of plans, and character (Attitude, Beliefs, and Values) incrementally to reach your goals - selecting the best projects and environment to aid in your growth.
- Monitor Your Progress - Your long-term plan needs short milestones to monitor your success against your goals.
- Enjoy the Journey - It is very rewarding to plan a challenging goal and to reach it.
Once you have a vision, a plan, and short-term milestones, you need to passionately drive for results. The short-term work items in your plan should go beyond the work goals and should include improving your skills. Solid execution means delivering reliably, creatively, and at very high quality.. Developing your own standard of excellence helps significantly in developing your credibility and reputation. Here are more tips to help you in planning and execution:
- The Secret Sauce: Enjoy What You Do - in the long-term, execution is not just about hard and creative high-quality work. To be successful, one needs to:
- Enjoy and be passionate about your work.
- Maintain balance in work, life, family, and other areas competing for time and attention.
- Prioritize and Focus - Always keep a prioritized list of things you need to do and focus on the most important items.
- Plan for all Possible Scenarios - People who do successful planning for a large product or even a small meeting have one thing in common. They can think and visualize the different scenarios that might happen during the execution in great detail (this usually needs going over these scenarios in detail with persistence and patience).
- Deliver - Delivering on your commitments and making things happen is a very enjoyable but difficult process. Many people have great ideas but they can’t get them implemented because of lack of discipline, detailed planning, and/or follow-up. This negatively impacts their careers.
- Have a Reputation for Getting Things Done - This will make it easier for you to get the most important and visible assignments and all the resources to do them.
- Produce High Quality Work – Better than expected quality, product, or results gets attention and sets you up for more challenging assignments in the future.
- Shine Through Challenges - Execution is considered outstanding when it meets a challenging schedule or creatively solves a historically challenging problem.
- Monitor and Continuously Re-Evaluate Your Goals - As part of monitoring execution, it is good to revise your goals periodically to adjust your long-term goals.
Your Skill Set
Advancing your technical, communication, people, and leadership skills is essential to getting interesting assignments and advancing your career. Some skills can take years to develop. Therefore, people who put off the improvement of their skills are impacting the type of assignments that are given or can select. Here are tips about some of the skills you need:
- Technical Skills - Work on advancing your technical skills with every project and assignment (e.g, development, planning, strategy, debugging, testing technologies, performance analysis, customer scenarios, customer requirements, quality, architecture and understanding the ecosystem) to reach your overall goals. Technical skills about high quality engineering is particularly important -- developing the right products for our customers and building our products in the right way.
- Communication Skills – Sharpen your communication and presentation skills to increase visibility of your ideas and your impact on others. The most important characteristic for leadership is good communication.
- People Skills – These are essential skills for individual contributors as well as leads. This includes team-work, listening skills, sensitivity to others, emotional intelligence, social skills, … For managers, people skills include connecting to their teams, recruiting great talents, and developing people over time.
- Leadership skills – These skills are essential for leads and managers. There are many good books to read in this area, as well as courses offered by the Management Development Group. A golden rule in leading a team is “Love them and lead them”. Also, you need to have distinguishing technical and/or personality attributes for people to follow you (you can’t depend on authority alone). You also need to be way ahead of your group in thinking of vision, strategy, and direction to lead your group well.
- Training – Make sure you read books and journals and expand your knowledge by attending relevant talks, seminars, courses, and conferences. Take advantage of the frequent and wide-ranging internal seminars and research presentations as well as external talks (e.g.. webcasts from strong university programs).
- Incremental Progress - Expand your skills and expertise incrementally. It is amazing to see the difference in skills and progress achieved over several years as a result of the accumulation of persistent small improvements every day.
Acquiring the right attitude, values and beliefs will give you energy and commitment to continue being productive. Attitude and beliefs develop as you gain confidence in your abilities and believe in your work. Here are some tips to improve your attitude and beliefs:
- Seek Traits of Successful People - There are excellent books in this area. Reading will help in pointing out what attitudes you need for success, understand the negative habits that are impacting you and others (so you can get rid of them), and recognizing why people around you are succeeding or failing. In a way, books will help you understand actions and reactions of yourself and others. Some important characteristics are passion, responsiveness, energy, discipline, patience, persistence, endurance, cooperation, modesty, expressing gratitude, taking risks, being proactive and appreciation of others. As you understand your strengths, polish them for long term success..
- Practice Makes Perfect - There are so many attitudes and beliefs that are helpful for success and it is not easy to acquire new ones. Only months and often years of persistence and practice can impact your character – but it’s worth it!
- Discover Your Weakness - Some very skilled and experienced people don’t realize their full potential because of weaknesses in their character (no respect/appreciation for others, arrogance, lack of maturity, childish behavior, uncontrolled temper, negative attitude, selfishness, intolerance, insensitivity,. etc). Realizing one’s weaknesses is the first step towards improving one’s character. If these people knew the opportunities they miss, they would have planned major changes to their behavior.
A great project is the most important method to improve your planning, execution, skills, and character. Selecting the projects you work on is important in reaching your short and long-term goals and in gaining the confidence and skills to do bigger and more important projects. If you have great ideas, you might be able to suggest a project to work on based on these ideas. Realize however, you may not get some exciting projects until you prove you are reliable and have the skills to see a complete project through. Here are some tips about project selection:
- Be Realistic - Some people fail in their projects because of the gap between what is required by a given project and the skills, character, execution, and planning capabilities they possess. Therefore, you need to understand your capabilities and be honest with others and yourself about what you can do.
- Evaluate Project Visibility and Importance - You need to determine how visible and important the project is that you are about to work on. Visible and important projects make a greater impact on your career. Interesting projects that have bad business plans are likely to be cancelled.
- Does This Assignment Help You Grow? - You need to determine how the project will help your skills and your ability to work on interesting future projects.
- Follow Through – Important: If you start a mission, take it to completion.
- Take Ownership - As your experience improves, getting ownership of an important project is essential for progress and success.
- Innovation – You need to have an exciting vision and innovative ideas to energize yourself and your teams. It is essential for the group’s long-term success.
Finally, some comments about the environment that you are working in:
- Right Place, Right Time - It is very important to be in the right team and have supporting management to reach your goals and achieve your maximum potential. You need to select a team that will challenge you, help you learn, and give you opportunities to grow.
- Know What to Avoid - Avoid teams that have political infighting or have severe management problems. Working in these teams will only waste your time and energy.
- Choose an Encouraging Environment - Appreciation and gratitude expressed from the managers and the team members to each other creates a very healthy and productive environment.
- Communicate With Your Manager - Communicate closely with your manager about your progress, your challenges, your career, your expectations, etc. This removes any possible misunderstanding about your deliverables. Frequent one-on-ones are the best method for tracking and revising short-term and long-term milestones and goals. There should be few surprises at review time.
- Get Your Manager’s Support – Let your manager know what support you need from him/her to reach your goals.
