Three basic steps involved in planning a successful career

Everybody wants to have a successful life, but not everyone knows how to go about achieving it. Many people don’t know what they’re interested in or even how to make good decisions. That’s where career counseling can help.

One of the most important decisions you will ever make in your life is choosing a career. Too many people just drift into jobs, and end up staying there because they don’t know what else to do. If this sounds familiar to you, career counseling can help you identify what you want to do, and show you that what others want you to do is less important.

Career counseling will help you identify what you really want to do with your life. Do you dream of a fast-paced career in investments? Perhaps you wish that you had more time and no money worries, so that you can do something altruistic, like working for a non-profit organization. Finding out what will make you happy is absolutely essential.

Career counseling will show you that you need to take risks in order to realize your dreams. If you haven’t already done so, explore various career options. Research alternative careers on the internet, or attend talks on interesting careers. If an opportunity comes your way, experiment with careers which interest you by taking on an internship or trying a brief work stint.

Career counseling will also reveal that a career doesn’t have to center on a job. You can have a very rewarding and profitable career without being an employee.

Good career counseling will have you examining the lives of successful career builders and asking what did they do to get to where they are today? Given your current skills and experience, will you be able to achieve what they have? If you need new skills to accomplish your goals, career counseling may show you that you need to equip yourself by taking up courses. Busy? Do what many resourceful people do - take internet-based, bite-sized courses. With determination, you will realize your dreams.

Career counseling facilitates the career planning process. These are the three basic steps involved in planning a successful career:

1. Self Assessment
Gather information about yourself, such as your interests, aptitudes, values, preferred environments, realities, roles and needs. Career counseling can help you sought out your priorities.

2. Options
Explore the options and industries you are interested in, as well as the job market. Get more details after narrowing down your options. Do detailed research through reading, taking up short courses, doing brief job stints, like internship, part-time work or even volunteering. If you’re short on time, you can get ‘career counseling’ from an online learning success center by studying the various career options and education offered.

3. Action
Take concrete steps to achieve your goal. Goals without appropriate action are worthless. Career counseling can help motivate you. Develop a career search strategy, prepare for job interviews, and identify sources for acquiring new skills and education, including life skills like communication and money management. Be disciplined.

Tips to Safeguard jobs during recession

Here are a couple of tips to safeguard your job .... There could be more, please feel free to add !

1. Attitude and behavior - Generally companies wait for a chance to cleanse the organization of people who don't have a great attitude and behaviour ! So be POSITIVE

2. Performance : Critical factor... in cases where it is difficult to define "productivity" as in the IT/BPO service space, please ensure that your supervisor knows about your performance ! Pay extra importance to productivity and Quality .... Clients can be most demanding at this time.

3. Avoid long holidays : At this time it is important that you prove yourself and you are around in the office. If the company can manage without you being around, then you might not be needed ! Avoid taking leave at this time.

- Avoid short holidays as well !!! Ensure that you spend longer hours at work. Both quality and quantity of work is important now.

4. Extra work : Take in extra work when existing employees take leave or are terminated

5. Initiative and Involvement : Show initiative and take up additional responsibility.

6. Acquire New Skills : Acquire new skills that are useful to you and the company ! Multitasking is the favourite buzzword these days.

7. Relax and Medidate : Job related stress factors that adversely affect health can be minimized by taking up yoga and medidating. This should help counter the day to day problems !


I am sure there is light at the end of the tunnel... but it is best that we continue to follow the above to safe guard our job at all times :)



Hope you found the above useful !

Your comments/responses are most welcome.

Thanks !

Career Counselling and Career Guidance at angstcorner

Cruise through your career irrespective of the economy.

One’s career can be compared to driving in a pot holed road. Any careful driver takes adequate precautions while traversing the road. The motorist has to make sure that damage to the vehicle as well as the occupants is minimized. Every successful professional likewise makes sure that he or she manoeuvres the career journey in a similar manner. There are always going to be similar potholes strewn in the career road. The challenge is to be alert, detect these potholes on time and steer one’s career around these obstacles. There would also be smooth stretches of road when one could be speeding along only to be confronted by a policeman issuing a ticket for over speeding. It is all about alertness and it is therefore important that one does not ever take things easy.

Nothing is a constant in life and one has to have the foresight to always expect change, much of which can be nasty many times. How does one surmount them and come out unscathed? How does one find the energy and guile to take on the office politicians? How does one just stand out in the corporate jungle? How does one plan a career that is ultimately fulfilling? One may have the most coveted job and yet he or she may not be happy.

Once the basics are established the career counselling coach will develop a resume to better reflect the next step in the career path. The next step for career counselling will be to assess the individual's strengths and weaknesses and, working together, establish key action words to describe a picture of the prospective employee. In what is often referred to as The 60 Second Sell, good career counselling will train the candidate to describe their attributes in a complete and concise manner. We all know how important networking is to our careers and businesses these days and fresh opportunities can be few and far between. The 60 Second Sell or Elevator Pitch is a term for quickly selling your best features or what you have to offer in 60 seconds or less. Career counselling will train you to create and use this tool most effectively.

What can we do for you?

It does not matter if you are just a fresher or a person with very little work experience. This might be the right time to plan your career as you have a long working window ahead of you. Alternatively, you may be a person with a few decades of experience and might be actually facing a mid career crisis. We can help irrespective of the years of experience you have or whether you have taken a break in your career to attend to something you always wanted to do and now want to get back to the corporate world. You might be planning to take a sabbatical and might someone neutral looking at things and giving you an honest opinion. You need someone outside your immediate set of colleagues, friends, bosses and peers who can look at all the facts and sift the facts from the emotion. We often get so involved in the routine that it makes terrific sense to take a break, not necessarily from your job but from your environment and see and feel the world around.

Career Counselling and Career Guidance

SECRET OF GETTING ALL THAT YOU WANT

Everyone wonders whether or not there is one great secret for truly successful living. There is. And it is not a secret. It has been quietly, steadily telling itself right in front of us all along. We just couldn't hear it over the clatter and chatter of our own secret demands. Listen quietly for a moment. Everything can change right now. Learning to hear this supreme secret is no more difficult than choosing whether to swim against a current or to let it carry you safely to the shore. Let it speak its wisdom to that secret part of you that can not only hear what it is saying but that is, in reality, its very voice. Listen to it now. It is saying, "Want What Life Wants." Think about it. Locked within these four simple words is the secret of an uncompromising power for effortless living; a new kind of power that never fails to place you on the winning side of any situation. Why? Because when you want what Life wants, your wish is for Life itself.

"What if I don't like what life brings to me?"

"Try to see that it is not what life has brought to you that you don't like. It is your reactions that turn the gift of life into the resentment of it."

"I don't want to sound ungrateful, but speaking plainly, I'm tired of being unhappy. What difference does it make why I feel this way?"

"Because these unhappy feelings are born out of life failing to conform to your ideas of what you need to be happy. This shows you, if you will see it, that Life itself isn't denying you happiness. It is your ideas about life that have failed you. Give up these wrong ideas instead of giving up on life. Be increasingly willing to see they are nothing but a constant source of conflict. Your false nature will tell you that you must have these self-protecting ideas; that you can't live without them or you will lose something valuable. What you must do, in spite of any such protest to the contrary, is to see that you can't live with them. All you will lose is your unhappiness."

Here are two lists that will not only make these life-healing ideas more personal for you, but they will help you to help yourself make a higher choice when it comes to what you really want from life. It would be valuable to study then compare the lists to each other. You may wish to add to either list some of your own insights, which I highly encourage you to do.

Let's look at what happens When You Want What You Want:

1. You are often nervous and anxious because life may not cooperate with your plans.
2. You are willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to get what you want, and this may include your integrity.
3. You are usually scheming in some way to win your next victory.
4. You are either in a battle or recovering from one.
5. You are unable to rest quietly when you need to.
6. You are easily angered when someone or something gets in your way.
7. You are forever driven to want something else.
8. You are against anyone else who also wants what you want.
9. You are certain that what you have is who you are.
10. You are always trying to convince yourself that you got what you want.

Now carefully consider the following. When You Want What Life Wants:

1. You are never disappointed with what happens.
2. You are always in the right place at the right time.
3. You are quietly confident no matter what the circumstances.
4. You are out of the reach of anger and anxiety.
5. You are awake and sensitive to your surroundings.
6. You are free of ever feeling as though you've missed out.
7. You are never thrown for a loss.
8. You are in total command of events.
9. You are mentally quiet.
10. You are eternally grateful.

"Is there a simple guideline to follow when it comes to distinguishing between what Life wants and what I want? How can I easily tell which is which?"

"Always remember the following. If any want is the source of anxiety or sorrow, that want is yours and not Life's. If the want has pain, it is in vain. To let real Life flood in, pull yourself out of the flood of self-wants that promise a future pleasure but only deliver a present pain."

"How do I pull myself out of the flood of my own wants?"

"See that you are being washed away by them and you will grow tired of being bounced along. Here is a key. Never accept the presence of any mental or emotional suffering as necessary, no matter how much importance these impostors lend to a particularly pressing want. By refusing their dark presence, you make space for the present moment to give you its indefinable presence. This is where the Life that you want--and that wants you--is waiting."

"All of what you have said makes good sense. To tell the truth, I would like to let go and let Life lead, but I'm afraid. What will happen to me if I give up my demands? Won't I lose control of my life?"

"You cannot lose control of something you never had control over in the first place. No human being controls life--his or hers or anyone else's. If it weren't for higher cosmic energies coming down, filling and animating your body right now, you couldn't be holding this book in your hands or reading its words. If you want to measure the level of an individual's stress, measure his insistence that life does as he wants. The only thing you will lose by learning to want what life wants is your fear of not being in control--which was never real control in the first place but only the sensation of it born out of living with its painful opposite."

Here is the most important point of all. No human being needs control over life because, in reality, no one is apart from it. Who you really are, your True Nature, is not separate from life.

Let Life bring you itself. Welcome it. At each instant, it is new, full--untouched and undiminished by any moment before it. To enter into this full relationship with Life is to give yourself to your Self. Fulfilling the true purpose of Life is fulfilling yourself. Here are five special key lessons to help you want what Life wants.

1. Nothing can be released and resisted at the same time, which means that any attempt to reject some weakness detected in us is the same as protecting it.
2. True nobility is not a question of birth right or social rank; it is the native estate of each soul that, upon awakening to its divine inheritance, knows the strength of these twin truths without having to think about them: justice and mercy are one, as are love and fearlessness.
3. Nothing judges you; it is what you love--and that love alone--that either persecutes you, or stands by you in your hour of need.
4. Whoever serves what he or she fears has failed to see that all they win for their service is to become more fearful.
5. We can spend our time struggling, in vain, to make others into what we want them to be, or we can see the inherent flaw in thinking this way and--rather than trying to change others to suit our needs -- see through the false idea that someone else is responsible for our fulfillment.

Job Interview Advice + Career Counselling Services

Working in a Young Office Environment

The Global News Network AFP has recently reported “if it’s longevity you are after, you may want to consider spending more time with members of the younger generation”. Of course, this scientific study was done on fruit flies (!) but by a great stretch of imagination it can be extrapolated to us humans too. But then, this was a truism known to our ancients and past generations. Youth does infect the old with longer life!

So working in a young office environment has all the benefits of radical calorie restrictions or human growth hormone. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished (as Shakespeare would say) by the relatively older!

However some rules must be followed and observed. The younger crowd will always have an indulgent attitude towards the older folk. “Hello Old man, ol’ timer, ancient relic” and such appellations would be freely used by the youth. One should take such remarks in a sporting manner and not get slighted at any stage.

There is another serious matter that the elder male generation should be aware of. And this is the very touchy subject of Sexual Harassment. It is very easy to be misunderstood if a young female colleague takes exception either to your remarks about her, or your behavior or even the way you treat her.

Whether there is any truth in it or not, the elder colleague must be chary of the risks involved. So please avoid any sexist remarks or sexist jokes or anything that can be misconstrued and given a sexist slant.

The best way to bring the younger crowd to your corner of the ring is to don the mantle of an elder statesman, a wise man full of helpful wisdom. Because of the sheer weight of your knowledge and experience in the ways of world, the younger crowd will come to you for advice and you should be able to help them in every way. This in itself is a very rewarding experience.

Another thing that should be borne in mind is that you should act your age and if you cannot take part in the activities of the younger colleague, you should ask to be excused in a gentle way, citing your advanced years and not try to get into their sphere of activities and eventually making a fool of yourself.

Seriousness and jocularity should go hand in hand both used in proper moderation and dignity. Acting one’s age and exuding wisdom is the best choice for senior citizens to portray in an office environment populated by the younger generation. Finally enjoy doing what you are doing with all sincerity that you can muster and may your broad shoulders be a haven for youth’s problems.

Age is no longer the criterion for career growth. It is all about merit and competence.

Career Counseling Services, Job Interview Advice

Do you matter to your organization?

Many people wonder if they matter to organizations. After all they go about doing their jobs and daily routines. How does all this aggregate at the organizational level? An organization is an aggregation of individuals driven by a common vision, bound together by the organizational culture. Even the lowest worker in an organization can and makes a difference, granted that the organizational culture and management practices shape them. A lowly worker can save hundreds of dollars each year by just doing some basic process innovation.

You can make a difference to your organization. Look at ways to save money or enhance revenue for it. It can be as simple as switching off the lights after a day’s work. Are you treating the company’s assets as if they were your own? You might be a Medical Sales Representative selling and promoting drugs to physicians. Have you made that extra effort in passionately describing your company’s latest drug to treat fever? Everyone needs to ask the question if they are passionate about the organization that they work for.

Very few organizations have been lucky to escape the effect of the economic recession. There have been widespread job losses. Do these job losses happen only in the junior ranks while the seniors go unscathed? Good organizations have helped survivors as well as those affected, cope with it and manage job loss depression by investing in outplacement and offering career counseling services to those impacted by corporate layoffs. We also tend to believe that in any corporate layoff it is the lower rung that gets affected most as the Senior Management takes care of itself. Since any organization has a pyramid structure with many more people in the lower ranks, we would see more number of people being affected. However if there are no corresponding loss of jobs in the senior levels, we would see a disproportionate ‘span’ which would make the entire process of job cuts meaningless.

We often feel that only Senior Management takes all decisions that matter. We feel powerless, too low in the hierarchy to make a difference. Nothing can be further from the truth. Even an office peon or janitor can make a difference by their disposition, commitment and quality of work.

Only those who believe that they can make a difference have successful careers. Make a difference to your job – for the right reason and success will all be yours.

Job Interview Coaching | Career Guidance Counseling Services

Career – a Sprint or a Marathon

How should we pace ourselves as we look at our working life. Some people go straight to work from College or High School while others acquire an additional qualification before looking at work. Many others take a break after working for a few years and go back to school and equip themselves with more education. Do we run very fast (and in the process risk injury and exhaustion) or trudge along at a pace that you are comfortable with and in the process see others overtaking. Ultimately the choice is yours. You could look at a different approach of either speeding or ambling along for a certain number of years and doing the opposite thereafter. There are no right or wrong answers; it all depends on your appetite, staying power and above all your ability to sustain the pace that you have set for yourself. The important thing to remember is to understand yourself and the goals that you have set for yourself. One thing is for certain – one cannot sprint through for all of the 30 years for sure. Very few people can do this. You cannot sprint in a marathon!

You can for sure make course corrections whenever or wherever required. The biggest facilitator (and obstacle) for this is “change”. Everything around us changes with the passage of time and therefore it will either facilitate or obstruct the course correction. Your career is in your hands; there s no one else who can make a difference as much as you can. In this long race one would come across hurdles all the time. It is for you to weave your way around it and not trip over the hurdle.
Many people get obsessed with their career. As Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally advised in an interview with the New York Times, “Don’t manage your career. Follow your dreams and contribute. Think about just exceeding expectations of every job you’re being asked to do. Continually ask for feedback on how it’s going. Ask everybody involved what you can do to do an even better job and the world will beat your door down trying to ask you to do more and more. The most important thing is that you are open to understanding what is expected and where you can make the biggest contribution”.

The devil lies in the details. It is important that as you run the career race, you keep your foot closer to the ground while not forgetting the big picture. Understand what you are working towards; if you are a project manager in a software company, understand the linkages between the various stakeholders, how important this project is important for the client and the client’s clients. If one isolates the actual career growth and instead focuses on exceeding expectations from every job that the person undertakes then career success is given, one need not even consciously work towards that.

Job Interview Coaching | Career Counseling Services

You are a brand!

It is very important that every person treats himself/herself as a brand. A brand stands for certain values. Ask any consumer the reason for a particular purchase decision and you will get something definitely about the brand which made the consumer go for that decision. The “Apple” brand stands for innovation, great UI and cutting edge technology. Similarly, during the days of the emergency in India, people used to tune into foreign broadcasting channels which were believed to broadcast more credible news than the government owned channels. On a lighter vein , one can argue that the media in India has not changed much even with the entry of private competition.

Ask yourself the question “How do people relate to you?” . Are you known for one or more of the following attributes (or anything else that positively describes you)? Honesty, Integrity, Intellect, Punctuality, Standing up for commitments etc. Similarly certain brands are associated with negative perceptions. Are you known for being dishonest, having poor execution skills, not walking the talk, being Machiavellian etc? If people relate to you for anything negative then you better work hard in erasing this perception among the people who matter. The choice is yours.

Your actions and deeds determine your brand value. If you are known positively for the values cherished by your organization, you are bound to do very well there and have a promising future. Otherwise it could be a fall to the bottomless pit. If your brand value is strong and the brand stands for values like integrity, team work, transparency etc, you will succeed irrespective of the organization. However hard your detractors try, they will never succeed. Success for many means walking over and trampling others; however this can hardly be termed as success. In the end it all catches up.

Nurture your brand. Be passionate about what it means to others and do not compromise on what it stands for. You should learn from others and adopt it to fit into your style. Some people simply mimic others which do not work well as there is dichotomy between the brand and the actions or values manifest in it. You do not have to put up pretence because the brand in you manifests itself pretty easily.
This is rarely understood by people. Organizations give a lot of importance to the brand value of potential hires. What does the person stand for? Are these in line with what the organization is looking for? Is the candidate’s brand value accretion to the brand value of the organization? One’s career is similarly linked with the brand value of the individual.

Ultimately the organization ascribes a value to the individual by looking at the brand. Certain things are taken for granted in the case of a brand and organizations have very low tolerance thresholds if there is a mismatch between what the individual’s brand value represents and what the person brings to the table.

Job Interview Coaching | Career Guidance Counseling Services

Is Leadership Important?

Leaders can achieve very little till others in the organization coalesce around the leader’s vision. The rank and file ultimately make the difference. The simplest way to look at this is the way organizations perform under different leaders. Let us take the case of Public Sector Organizations which operate for the most part under isolated and protected environment. Some heads perform better than the others. They are able to rally the rank and file better, keep the focus on clients and customers and ultimately generate better financial results. Even in mature multinational organizations, some CEO’s stand out for the difference they make to the organization.

If you are a people manager, you need to realize that everyone in your team is looking at you as a role model. Assemble a team that shares your vision and take them together to the end goal. You will stand out and your carer will take off. Even if you are not a people manager but an individual contributor, influence co-workers in your immediate circle of influence to align around your goals. Take time and invest in career coaching for your team members. Career guidance counselling is something every team member looks forward to. It will make your job that much more simple when everyone is all that positive and knows that the leader has the best intentions as far as every one’s career is concerned.

One good example to study is the US Presidency. Institutions are well defined by convention and by the written constitution. The only real difference theoretically we should see is one of ideology. However nothing can be further from the truth. Even institutions get dramatically influenced by leadership. There is nothing that can be run on auto pilot. Even an airplane needs to switch from auto controls to manual one when the plane is about to land. Even the most advanced fly by wire aircraft depends on the skill of the pilot to make sure that it lands safely.

Tough conditions brings out the best from good leaders and the not so good from the not so good leaders. Take the care of the current economic crisis. Some leaders like the ex Chiefs of Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch have not exactly done something they would be remembered for positively. Instead look at the CEO of Ford. He not only saved the company from the ignominy of a bankruptcy through some clever moves but has made sure that the company will probably emerge as the strongest amongst the auto players in the US. True, there have been loss of jobs in Ford as well but the company has emerged out stronger.

It is all about leadership. Leaders make the difference for any organization (or for that matter any country) between failure and success. The benefit to employees or the organization itself lies in the capability of the leader. Even institutions will fail if the leadership is incompetent.

Success has many fathers; failure has none!

People always want to own a piece of success and never a piece of failure. This is especially true in organizations that place a premium on politicking. Many organizations that do not have a professional management but have a family or individual controlling the organization believe in the simple dictum of divide and rule. Often, we can see our colleagues, subordinates and of course bosses take credit for something that is deemed a success, something goes wrong and the weakest “suspect” would be hung from the nearest scaffold.

How does one handle this, especially because ones career can depend on how well one manoeuvres through the system? If one cannot beat the system, join it (as long as your moral values or conscience permits it). One has to be opportunistic, hedge correctly and be willing to beat the ‘suspect’ with all the force in your command. Such organizations invest very little in career counseling for its employees and are pure transactional with mass layoff when the economic environment deteriorates and mindless hiring when the going is good. Such organizations have little chance of survival over the medium or long term.

This tendency becomes especially evident when the organization is undergoing financial stress as a result of economic recession. Everyone is trying to survive in the corporate jungle and it is very rarely merit or one’s achievements that determine whether a person will be part of the corporate layoff. It depends to a great extent on how well the person is networked with the ultimate decision maker who picks out the people who need to be laid off. To say that the entire process is scientific would be a big lie. Rarely is the process scientific. Some obvious choices become clearly apparent but in many cases it just becomes a matter of chance, worse than a lottery, which determines the person who will have to ultimately leave the organization. It is all about networking and a lot of good luck!

Most people would not mind the team members who made a project successful claim credit. The challenge emerges when we have outsiders trespassing and usurping the real players who made that success possible. Such imposters lurk around in all organizations. Using the latest communication tools at their disposal like power point and e-mail, they make sure that they mark their scent in the nearest flagstaff, pretty much like the neighboring dog. Managers often find it difficult to separate the chaff from the grain because it involves a lot of hard work. The jungle takes over where the person with the loudest voice wins the race. It may not be just, but it is the law of the corporate circus, pretty much like the law of nature.