X is going to resign her seven-figure salary job and work with an NGO for six months.
Is she deranged? No. Far from it.
She manages a team at a multi-national bank and is rated one of their best employees.
“So what happens after six months?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I will decide then.”
She seemed at peace at what could be the defining point in her career. She is one of the many who are making conscious choices to leave the rat race and pursue personal satisfaction. 
I realize that we live in an age where the image of success is sometimes more important than actual success. However, people have started asking themselves: What is the definition of success? Do material possessions define life? Do we have to bear the drudgery of a job we hate?
They are finding that their definition of success is far different from others. However, they are not bothered; they do not fear being isolated from the mainstream.
So how do they do it?  They believe in:

• Appreciating themselves and their achievements
• Discovering  interests close to their heart
• Visualizing their future
• Developing realistic expectations
• Defining what success really means to them
• Choosing/changing their jobs/careers wisely
• Focusing on goals
• Not worrying about results

Are you dissatisfied with your current job or career? If not, retrain yourselves and choose another. For more advice on career change, read the resources given here. You can profile your skills, identify your training needs, and check the list of training programs given on the Individuals page at our site.
Find the work you love, train yourself and excel at it. Why leave your heart at home when you go to work?

 “Nobody understands the challenges I face because they think I am idling away at home. This is so unlike a 9-hour job; there is no let-up!” said a close friend who gave up her career to be a homemaker.
This one is for you, dear unsung heroine!

She plans the budget for the month, carefully allotting money for school-related fees, household expenses, payments for investments and savings, and salary for hired help.

At the supermarket, she compares the quality and price of different brands of many products. She would beat any quality inspector or auditor easily. She has mastered the art of spotting better quality within the restraints of a strict budget. 

Every day, she deals with the complaints of her maid, with the patience of a saint. She hires hardworking people to work in the land around her house and negotiates payment with them.

She keeps in touch with the vendors who supply her with newspapers, milk etc. She maintains good business relationships with them so that they provide reliable, quality products and service.

Second helpings of a delicious dish? Washed and ironed dresses in cupboards, ready to wear? She does them all. She always ensures that her family is well looked after and happy. Think of the family as a firm and its members as its stakeholders; if so, isn’t this a good example of stakeholder satisfaction?

She finishes her work on time so that other members of the household are able to leave the house on time (on weekdays) or just to relax and have a good time (on weekends).

Fight between children? Mother-in-law ill? Husband angry? Death in the family? She marshals resources, provides leadership, maintains peace, or works as a team player in any crisis and see to it that nobody is affected.

Her job is certainly not a bed of roses—it has no fixed timings; there is no rest, and in most cases, there is no stand-in person. However, she carries on with minimum complaints and a great deal of equanimity.

She may not rush out every morning with a laptop and a smart phone. However, as C. S. Lewis said, the homemaker has the ultimate career. And, we need to learn more from her.

(I have referred to ‘she’,’ her’ and ‘women’ in this post for ease of writing. No offence meant to either gender!)

Development is an improvement in our capabilities relative to our current capabilities. It is not relative to the capabilities of others. Thus our objective has to be to better ourselves.

In today’s era of talent I find it important for people to gain mastery not just in one skill but in more than one, at least in two. Well, this may even be a necessity.

During the course of creating our website/portal ready I was looking for people who could create our website. Our technology partner are adept at creating the applications but creation of the front end / UI / design is not there forte. I went about looking for people who could create the UI or do the designing for us. I faced many challenges in the process. There were people who were adept at the tools and technology – html, photoshop, coreldraw, CSS and so on. But the problem with almost all these people were that their aesthetic senses were very poor. The designs they created were very poor in quality, they were not appealing, the human element in the designs were missing. So here was a set of people who were technically good but poor in creativity. Then I found the other set of people who could do the creative part very well. They were able to absorb the concept create visuals, the colours, contrasts and layouts were very appealing but they would not know how to turn them into web pages.

The ideal person would have been those who had the aesthetic or creative abilities with the technical skills.  This is what I call by being skilled in multiple faculties. Is it about yin and yang in skills? Is it about the well developed right and left brain? Maybe.

We can find parallels of this case of combination of creative plus technical talent for web in other areas too. A functional specialist in a software industry has to be able to appreciate the software engineering to contribute to creation of appropriate solutions. A civil architect like our web creatives, need a combination of capabilities in civil engineering plus the aesthetics involved in architecture. A surgeon needs to be adept at the surgical practices and also the technicalities of the medical equipments. A combination of functional expertise and business skills in required for successfully running an enterprise or business unit. A good music composer also is one who is adept at sound technology.

Such combinations are rare to find. I realised this in my search for web creative person. I also believe that the same situation prevails in organizations where such combinations are required. There is a premium one would place for such multiple skills. HR, managers and leaders in companies could look for people within the organization who have the aptitude for such dual specialization and nurture them. But such spotting of talent would require out of the box thinking, a classical performance appraisal system may not be able to bring out such talent. Lets say we want to nurture the creative talent in engineers and that we would like to sport such talent. Maybe the organization could organise a competition which involves modeling, drawing, sketching, painting, etc. for engineers. On the part of the individuals when they believe that their field may require dual talent, maybe such talent can be nurture if the basics (aptitude and inclination) are there in the individual.

Realising the importance and the value of the duality of skills is the first step.

This is a very important article re-emphasizing a significant trend which we have been noticing for years now and are seeing accelerate even further. The analysis is primarily from the prevailing scenario in the US. However, I feel there are points which have implications or are indicators of things happening and to come world over.

Some of the key points made in this artilce include:

- recession has accelerated the process of finding alternates to permanent jobs including automation, temping, outsourcing and so on

- "diminishing job security is also widening the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers

- "....26% of the US workforce had jobs that were in one way or another "nonstandard". That includes independent contractors, temps, part-times, and freelancers."

Read:

The Disposable Worker - from the Business Week

My comments:

The fact that we are in turbulent times when change is accelerating the changes in the engagement model between the employer and the employee. This phenomenon of temping is not new. It has always been there. Labour was hired during the harvest season (seasonal workers). I worked in a PSU and notice that 30% of the labour was on contract (this was twenty years back). However, what may be new is that the so called temping and alternate models of engagement are happening at skilled and managerial levels too. Well, maybe we thought these levels were permanent. It is not. Alternate modes of engagement will increase for many reasons. Only one of them is the recession or the consciousness to reduce costs of labour. The other reason is also the changing attitude of the individuals to the engagement patterns of the yester-years. Many are opting voluntarily and consciously out of the corporate permanent regimen which would then force the corporates to find alternate engagement models if they desire to engage this pool of talent.

Whichever way it may be - whether the alternate engagement models are a consequence of changing behaviour of human beings or is driven by the organisations due to economic necessities, one thing is clear - the individual will have to take responsibility for one's career. And this includes career from a holistic perspective i.e. what is expected from work, how one wants to manage ones life for now and the future and so on. The era of individualisation demands maturing of individuals to take responsibility for their selves.

Our career development, from one perspective can be viewed to be a balancing of two different needs - need to constantly strengthen our core talent or skills and the need to be flexible to the changing environment.

We have certain aptitudes at our core. We have further nourished them through our school and college education, training and experience in jobs. These talents or skills are central to us when we are into our professional life.We may have had the aptitude to sell, got trained in selling and gained experience in selling in one or more companies. Selling skills is thus central to us. We need to appreciate this central nature of talent. We need to constantly enrich this central talent of ours.

But this central talent or skills is one side of the story. How and where we apply them is another and they involve the context in which we apply them. In the case of selling the context could be selling of say consumer goods.

Some of the contexts change and they may change quite rapidly. New companies emerge. Even new industries emerge. Mobile industry was nascent till the mid 90s and in the last decade and half it has grown quite rapidly. Within the industry itself the changes have been quite dramatic. Internet proliferation and the businesses leveraging the Internet start proliferating aggressively since the mid 90s. Now we hear of nanotechnology, green tehcnology, and so on.

The industries themselves are contexts. Every industry has at its core some specific knowledge or technology which is central to the industry. For example the telecom industry has at its core the communications technology. But the industry itself employs people from different skills, functions, for example, the customer service, marketing, finance, HR, manufacturing and so on. These changes in the industries give opportunities for individuals to move across the newer industries from the previous ones.

The shift is possible from one industry to another if one is flexible enough to adapt to the different context. An aspiring salesman may see the emerging businesses as opportunity and move into them. There would be nuances of the industry specific to the industry which the individual may have to pick up fast. Moving to a mobile industry would require the salesman to appreciate the different kinds of products and services of the industry, the value proposition for the customers and so on.

The adapatability has to be coupled with the core theme of strengthening ones talent in that function or domain of ones choice. If I am salesman I would need to keep honing my selling skills. So we need to keep our core solid and keep strengthening it while we we are also adaptable to the contextual changes.

Balance of the dual forces for harmony applies to talent too - balance between the stengthening of the core and the flexibility at the periphery.