Tips for Successful Career Planning

You own your career and have the best interest in being successful. You need to be the main driver for planning your career and putting enough thought towards reaching your goals. Your managers can and should help and guide you in planning but they cannot be responsible for it. Here are some thoughts on six areas to advance and plan your career:

1. Vision and Long-term Goals

Developing a vision for yourself will help you determine a clear destination and direction. Avoiding detours that don' t help your overall career goals will help you reach your destination faster. It will help you make decisions about projects, jobs, and skills that will assist achieving your goals. Here are more tips to help long-term planning and the achievement of your goals:

· Developing expertise in a critical area that you are passionate about should be one of your long-term goals. Experts in key areas get the best assignments, enjoy their work more than others, and advance quickly in their careers.

· People become passionate about areas that they understand in great depth. It takes time to reach this level of depth.

· Grow expertise gradually. Every day counts!

· Improve your skills, execution of plans, and character (Attitude/Beliefs) incrementally to reach your goals - selecting the best projects and environment to aid in your growth.

· Your long-term plan needs short milestones to monitor your success against your goals.

· It is very rewarding to plan a challenging goal and reach it.

2. Plan/Execution

Once you have a vision, a plan, and short-term milestones, you need to passionately drive for results.

The short-term work items in your plan should go beyond the work goals and should include improving your skills. Solid execution means delivering reliably, creatively, and at very high quality. Developing your own standard of excellence helps significantly in developing your credibility and reputation. Here are more tips to help you in planning and execution:

· Execution is considered outstanding when it meets a challenging schedule or produces better than expected quality, product, or results.

· Success in long-term execution is not just about hard and creative high-quality work. To be successful long-term, one needs to:

1.Enjoy the work.

2.Maintain balance in work, life, family, and other areas competing for time and attention.

· As part of monitoring execution, it is good to revise your goals periodically to adjust your long-term goals.

· Delivering on your commitments and making things happen is a very enjoyable but difficult process. Many people have great ideas but they can' t get them implemented because of lack of discipline, detailed planning, and/or follow-up. This negatively impacts their careers.

· It is important to get the reputation of getting things done. This will make it easier for you to get the most important assignments and the resources to do them.

· Prioritize: Always keep a priority list of things you need to do and focus on the most important items.

· Planning: people who do successful planning for a large product or even a small meeting have one thing in common. They can think and visualize the different scenarios that might happen during the execution in great detail (this usually needs going over these scenarios in great detail with persistence and patience).

3. Skills

Advancing your technical, communication, people, and leadership skills is essential to getting interesting assignments and advancing your career. Skills might take years to develop. Therefore, people who put off the improvement of their skills are impacting the type of assignments that are given or can be selected. Here are tips about some of the skills you need:

· Technical Skills - Work on advancing your technical skills with every project and assignment (development skills, testing skills, automation skills, debugging skills, performance analysis skills, and architectural skills) to reach your overall goals.

· Communication Skills - Sharpen your communication and presentation skills to increase visibility of your ideas and your impact on others. The most important characteristic for leadership is good communication.

· People Skills - These are essential skills for individual contributors as well as leads. This includes team-work, listening skills, sensitivity to others, emotional intelligence, social skills, …

· Leadership skills - These skills are essential for leads and managers. There are many good books to read in this area, as well as courses offered by the Management Development Group. A golden rule in leading a team is “Love them and lead them”. Also, you need to have distinguishing technical and/or personality attributes for people to follow you (you can' t depend on authority alone).

· Training - Make sure you read books and journals and expand your knowledge by attending relevant talks, seminars, courses, and conferences. Take advantage of the frequent and wide-ranging internal seminars and research presentations as well as external talks (e.g. University of Washington).

· Incremental Progress - Expand your skills and expertise incrementally. It is amazing to see the difference in skills and progress achieved over several years as a result of the accumulation of persistent small improvements every day.

4. Character (Attitude and Beliefs)

Acquiring the right attitude and beliefs will give you energy and commitment to continue being productive. Attitude and beliefs develop as you gain confidence in your abilities and believe in your work. Here are some tips to improve your attitude and beliefs:

· There are excellent books in this area. Usually reading is not enough except in pointing out what attitudes you need for success, understanding the negative habits that are impacting you and others (so you can get rid of them), and recognizing why people around you are succeeding or failing. In a way, books will help understand actions and reactions of yourself and others. Only months and often years of practice can impact your character.

· There are so many attitudes and beliefs that are helpful for success. It is not easy to acquire new ones. Some important characteristics are passion, responsiveness, energy, discipline, patience, persistence, endurance, cooperation, modesty, expressing gratitude, taking risks, and appreciation of others.

· Some very skilled and experienced people don' t realize their full potential because of weaknesses in their character (no respect/appreciation for others, arrogance, childish behavior, uncontrolled temper, negative attitude, selfishness, intolerance, insensitivity, . etc). Realizing one' s weaknesses is the first step towards improving one' s character. If these people know how many opportunities they miss, they would have planned major changes to their behavior.

· Pick a few traits that you consider as your strengths so you can focus on polishing them. Also, pick a few weaknesses that you like to eliminate or improve. Work on your strengths and weaknesses as part of your development plan.

5. Projects (Assignments)

Selecting the projects you work on is important in reaching your short and long-term goals and in gaining the confidence and skills to do bigger and more important projects. If you have great ideas, you might be able to suggest a project to work on based on these ideas. You may not get some exciting projects until you prove you are reliable and have the skills to see a complete project through. A great project is the most important method to improve your planning, execution, skills, and character. Here are some tips about project selection:

· Some people fail in their projects because of the gap between what is required by a given project and the skills, character, execution, and planning capabilities they possess. Therefore, you need to understand your capabilities and be honest with others and yourself about what you can do.

· You need to determine how visible and important the project is that you are about to work on. Visible and important projects make a greater impact on your career. Interesting projects that have bad business plans are likely to be cancelled.

· You need to determine how the project will help your skills and your ability to work on interesting future projects.

· It is important if you start a mission, you take it to completion.

· As your experience improves, getting ownership of an important project is essential for progress and success.

· Leaders - Need to have an exciting vision and innovative ideas to energize themselves and their teams. It is essential for the long-term survival of their groups.

6. Environment (Team, Management, etc.)

Finally, some comments about the environment that you are working in:

· It is very important to be in the right team and have supporting management to reach your goals and achieve your maximum potential. You need to select a team that will challenge you, help you learn, and give you opportunities to grow.

· Avoid teams that have political infighting or have severe management problems. Working in these teams will only waste your time and energy.

· Appreciation and gratitude expressed from the managers and the team members to each other creates a very healthy and productive environment.

· Communicate closely with your manager about your progress, your challenges, your career, your rating…etc. This removes any possible misunderstanding about your deliverables. Frequent one-on-ones are the best method for tracking and revising short-term and long-term milestones and goals. There should be few surprises on review time.

· Manager' s Support - Ask your manager of what support is needed to reach your goals.

I would like to thank Rob Short, Kristen Blanck, RezaB and other leads for commenting on an early draft of the memo.