A random walk up career path: Part 1
What is career path and why should we set a career goal?
My company has done its current annual review and released the results. Luckily, I have gotten another promotion. From my experience, I started my SDE (Software Development Engineer) career at the lowest level in the company and went through 8 levels in 9 years with 7 promotions. I also transformed myself from an individual contributor to an EM (engineer manager). There are many learnings along the way, and I want to do a retrospect and share them with my audience.
Career Path is a topic we could not finish in one story or a book. I plan to discuss it with a series of stories. We could thoroughly examine each sub-topic within 3 to 5 minutes of reading and gain insight into my experiences and learning.
This article will focus on answering the question: Why do we need to care about our career path?
What is career path?
A career path is a series of jobs that help you progress towards your goals and objectives.
Here, the focus is your goals and objectives. Translate it into actionable words: what kind of person do you want to be?
I am in the software development industry. Therefore, I would use this industry as an example.
Assuming you just graduated from school and got an offer into a software company as a junior engineer. Based on your personality, you may want to be a top-level engineer to pursue the excellency of your programming skillset. If you love to communicate with people and are very organized, you may wish to be a project manager to own an excellent feature or even a product.
These are the major categories for you to consider. There are even more details within those categories. Even if you want to be a top engineer, you may need to decide on a subfield you wish to focus on: UI or backend service development, data pipeline, or algorithm design. There are numerous subfields and possibilities for you to choose from and focus on.
But the important thing is that you need to have a goal in your mind early in your career.
Why is a goal so important?
The importance of a goal is in the following folds:
- Offer a long-term focus
- Offer a learning direction
- Offer objectives for you to measure
- Once achieved, you will feel accomplished.
A goal offers a long-term focus.
In the modern world, there are many things to make us distracted. We may be jealous of a YouTuber’s subscriptions and income, so we want to start our side-track. Or we see other PMs(Project Managers) are so powerful and famous, so we think that could be an alternative track. Distractions and temptations are everywhere and all the time.
A goal should offer you a solid long-term focus. You would keep working toward that goal by arranging your daily activities, habits, and relationship accordingly. Meanwhile, when you have a chance to choose your project, you would have a gauge to measure the correlations between a task and your long-term goal. Therefore, your efforts could be more focused and speed up the progress for you to become the person you wish.
A goal offers a learning direction.
Learning is so vital for everyone. Nothing is constant but change. To adapt to this nature, we need to keep learning.
With countless new things, a growth mindset is the only way for people to keep relevant to modern society. However, learning what is the first question for any eager learners to answer.
The answer is closely related to your career goal. To be a solid C++ programmer, you would like to read the Effective C++ and More Effective C++. Besides that, you may also need to learn courses to teach you how to use WinDBG, thread handling, memory management, etc. To be a good EM, you may wish to enroll into an MBA program, learn more about project management or practice writing documentation and blogs (this is what I am doing now).
Your career goal offers you the guidelines to select what you want to learn next, and the more you know, the closer and faster you can achieve your career goal.
A goal offers objective measures.
I am doing data analysis, dashboards, and pipelines. It is crucial for a business to always keep an eye on the objective business essentials through data, an objective measure. The same implies to personal life as well.
Once we have a goal, we can establish objectives for the path. When I was in school, I knew my measure would be the class GPA, the number of papers I published, and their influence index. At work, I knew my measures would be project impact, reputation, relationships with others, job titles, promotions, review results, and, eventually, the overall compensation packages.
There could be many ways to define your measurements, and no one is perfect for your personal life and career path. The important message here is: that you would need one. And the one you rely on should reflect the goal you wish to achieve.
Goal offers the accomplishment feeling.
In US swimming, there is one table called: motivation times. It would have levels such as B, BB, A — AAAA. There would only be two dozen top swimmers to represent the US for Olympic Games every four years. It is a goal for all the young swimmers, but a too hard, almost impossible one. But to keep the swimmers engaged and motivated, the US swimming association provides this motivation table. You should see my daughter’s excitement when she could achieve the next level. That is a mixed feeling of pride, excitement, and accomplishment. As a human race, we would need these accomplishment feelings to keep us moving forward.
The preset goal offers precisely that for you. Set one, work hard toward it, and celebrate once you get it. You deserve it.
Goal would change from time to time.
Career paths would change from time to time based on environmental changes. Do not be too stubborn not to adjust your goals.
I used to work for computer vision in school for my Ph.D. study, and my first job was video codec development when computer vision with only minimal application scenarios. Then switch to data processing and analysis when the product needs more attention on the quality consistency instead of codec advantages. The key here is to balance your personal interest and the business environment.
Once you are in a company, consider your decision based on business needs. We, the engineers, are always so deep into the engineering details to pursue perfection and ignore the business. However, it is a simple fact that your engineering effort would not bring profits without a proper business plan. Business is impacted by many different trends and external factors, such as economics, competition, and policies. We, as individuals, could not change those trends, only adapt them. The good positive loop would only happen when your spirit and efforts aligned with the business, not against it.
What would be a career path without a goal?
Practically, with or without a goal, your career will still generate a career path as time goes by. When the outside economics is good, we have many friends switching jobs from one company to another and chasing the best package without considering their career goals. Many still like their new job with good compensation to support their family. They are happy and fulfilled. It seems like a career goal is not necessary.
However, a career goal could further accelerate your progress. For the people above, if they have a career goal and consider it during their job hunting practice, they could have a higher probability of achieving their larger compensation package and faster achievement for their career advantages.
Summary
In the first chapter of my career path series, we first discussed career path. Then offer four reasons to demonstrate why the goal is vital for your career path, and you should adapt your career goal to the business needs. At last, we emphasize that a career goal could speed up your career advantages.
