Choosing a Career - Part 1 (Understanding the Landscape)

Before choosing your career you must:

1. Understand the landscape
2. Understand yourself
3. Decide your goal

Here are some pointers:

A framework to understand the landscape (See glossary for definitions)

1. Discipline (Narrow down / focus on what is relevant to Industry & Function and master the key concepts)
2. Industry (Understand key drivers and key functions – with your skills and attitude check if it is the right place to be in)
3. Function (understand the role, the tools and the language 

      Review your progress using this framework

Next you should understand the hierarchy of skills

1. Execution Skills: (Ability to personally perform a task)
2. Conceptual Knowledge: (Understanding the underlying concept -technical / functional)
3. Functional Competence: (Understanding the role of the function in the organization)
4. Integrative Capability: (Ability to manage function or functional task in the context of a business or organization , includes interacting & collaborating with other functional heads)

At the beginning of your career, it is a good idea to understand the prospects of different industries in the national and international context. A good place to start is to look at McKinsey's disruptive dozen to understand where the maximum opportunity is likely to be.

You might like to understand how crowded the industry & space is, are jobs easy to get but growth difficult, is it a sunrise industry, how complex etc.

The accompanying picture shows possible career tracks in an organization.

In the next post we will see how you can understand yourself

Also please see our sister blog Skills for Excellence for a framework to understand skills