Objective of this Post :
To let the *reader’s prepare their own definition of a career.
*Readers – Any college students who have little or more interest to frame their career, and require a source of reference to frame their own career definition.
Rationale :
To define the exact definition of their career,Individuals used to have random to organized career related discussion with their acquaintances , friends, colleagues, classmates ,seniors.
Students usually try to find following types of answers from various sources:
— Its my first year of MCA , Why I am studying these subjects ? , How these subjects or MCA contribute to my professional career ?
— I am a final year Mech. engineering student ? Should I go for M.Tech to study more specific about Mechanical engineering and then settle myself for X company ?
— Seems electrical engg. might not be a promising area for my career , I need to shift in computer science area ? that might be a great choice ? Isn’t it ?
— Many of my friends are preparing for GRE,TOFEL to get enrolled for M.S course at any top class university in United States ?
— Its too boring to study engineering , I might set-up a start-up as I am advanced professional in photography and my skills are already valued by many of my surrounding friends and other photographic professionals ?
— I am very keen to understand the internals, origin, concepts, use cases, and real practicals of X technology ?, Is that right to do ?
— I would be interested in doing research on X area, and serve for my country for X reasons , that’s the objective brought me here to start my professional study ?
— I would be highly interested to get a respectable job in X area , and that’s the objective brought myself to study here ?
…etc etc
Many of them are already clear or mostly clear with their career definition because of e.g.
— Communication with inherited mentor e.g. brother , father
— Communicating with acquaintance e.g. cousin brother
Or anything else.
Now that individual’s stream got left who are independent ones, and not closely tied with any mentor.
Usually they get in touch with random mentors.
So How exactly they should define their career definition ?
Sample answer from an Individual point of view :
“ I didn’t have any close brother,sister, or any kind of inherited source of mentorship, and I didn’t get much answers from my acquaintances, friends, seniors.
Though everybody provided me set of answers based on my questions, but later I found my questions were not clear as they should be, so I received random answers.
It happened me to work on a disciplined and organized manner to get my clear career definition, and I did following :
——–
STEP-1 :
—————————————————————————-
I tried to understand more about the objectives of my study e.g.
——- What type of knowledge gain I would be having from my professional education ?
——- How much I know today and how much I need to expect after the completion of my
course ?
—— How this study will contribute to my expectation ?
——–
STEP-2 :
—————————————————————————-
I listed out all of my interest since the time I remember to an excel sheet and categorized them into different categories e.g. interests in sports, interests in technologies, interests in entertainment activities.
— Interest in sports e.g. swimming is the one i like most, because that involved complete individuality
—Interest in technologies e.g. X would be my domain , and that require X technologies
— Interest in entertainment activities e.g. spartacus is the TV series I would like to watch, because I would like to know more about sparta
——–
Step-3:
—————————————————————————-
I listed out most of my objectives [ I knew that objectives changes based on the time and situation. so based on my current situation, I wrote set of my objectives after the step-2, and keep those modifying as and when it supposed to be. ]
— My objective is to become a well defined IT professional in next 3 years.
— My objective is to prepare myself for higher -studies in X area
— My objective is to become a legal advisor in IT areas
— My objective is to publish papers in IEEE journals, and file patent on X to let my skills recognized globally.
——–
Step-4:
—————————————————————————-
I designed a preliminary prototype of my career by considering several parameters e.g. time ,money, interest, skill development, contribution to society , contribution to the professionalism and then thought like …
——- Should I have further education ?
Or
——- Should I have experience in a organization and then further education ?
Or
——- Should I have to join an organization and grow with that ?
This preliminary prototype consist a short term plan, like a basic thing which I really required to go for long term goals e.g.
— To become a well defined IT professional , I need to be master on problem solving and also understand its origin, and to start I identified the book concrete mathematics a foundation for computer science [Knuth,Graham,Patashnik]
——–
Step-5 :
—————————————————————————-
I started to maintain a career definition document, and it keep that evolved based on the development of my thoughts e.g.:
—- To understand myself e.g. as I made strong focus to understand my interest,skill development while working on my daily tasks
—- To understand many situations e.g. career while in study vs work vs research
—- To Understand career related parameters e.g. domain,
—- To Understand personal parameters e.g. financial situations, responsibilities, capabilities, positive attributes ,negative attributes
I defined various sections on this document, also mentioned dates, and text, and stored on Google Docs, so It can be easily accessible from anywhere.
——–
Step-6:
—————————————————————————-
Reviewed Step-1 to Step-5.
Every Time I reviewed my steps, I always brought a new set of questions, and then I approached people e.g. my seniors, parents, acquaintance. I asked clear questions to get the clear answers e.g.
—- Bank loan related questions from bankers.
—- Financial discussion with my parents.
—- Advanced technical and skill development questions with my professors and seniors.
—- When I didn’t find any close reference , then I approached to Internet forums, and Q/A sites e.g. QUORA,StackOverflow for Technical, Academic,English Writing,Google Groups
—- Other than , bought books from Amazon, Junglee or Pothi e.g. studied the book “The Ph.D. Process: A Student’s Guide to Graduate School in the Sciences’ to understand the overall PH.d process.
For Initial months ,It was little difficult to maintain a discipline. Later once my thoughts got aligned and written down on paper, everything became easy and just a activity .
——–
Step-7 :
—————————————————————————-
I made this exercise into practice from the day one , and keep it evolved as much It can be.
Result :
Afterwards whenever I am involved in study, sports,entertainment,travel,lectures,extra co-curricular activities, I am very clear e.g.
that I am watching X types of movies because of X reasons
that I am concentrating on X Studies and X topics because of X reasons.
that I am learning X foreign language because of X reasons.
that I am reading X books for X reasons.
that I am travelling to X places to X reasons.
X – It means anything based on self-defined parameters – as explained from step-1 to step-7
And these things made my life, work, study,career very interesting.
Do you know at the end or any logical/reasonable time – What that career definition document was ?
It was my CV or Career Profile or Resume “
[ We will talk more on my subsequent posts ]
Changed logs :
[Subsequent changes will be mentioned here ]
Created Post : Title : What is my career definition ,Type : Post : Date : 3rd-September-2012, Location :Seoul,Korea
Published Post : 4th-September-2012
Added Image and made some formatting : 5th-September-2012
Added more explaination : 8th-September-2012
Added form,corrected grammatical mistakes, added hyper links : 26th-september-2012
Author: Sumit Arora / sumit@thecareertools.com
I would like to share my career definition here
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