Overcoming the Growth Trap in Career Management!

As a career coach I specialize in reinvention. What does that mean? It means that when clients feel that their career (not just their job) is tanking they need to find other careers to keep their rsum in good stead and their momentum in check. What are some examples of these reinventions? Here is a partial list: From software developer to product manager; from a strategic consultant to a corporate executive; from a Development Head to a Program Manager; from a physician (internal medicine) to a Chief Medical Officer (CMO) in a Pharma company, etc. My own career has involved four previous reinventions and I am now in my fifth career in as many industries.

The growth trap is a phenomenon that results when your career (not just your job) tanks because of factors such as evolving technology, economic conditions (labor arbitrage), automation, and changing customer expectations cause traditional careers to tank. For example, many job losses in the manufacturing sector in the US are not only due to outsourcing, as is commonly believed, but are due to rapid automation of jobs where fewer people are required to do the same jobs. Such advances also often eliminate rework and other labor-intensive burdens on companies, which forces them to move to automation at an accelerated pace. It is estimated that if driverless cars/trucks are fully made operational it will affect more than six million driver jobs in the US alone.

Although I do not deal with clients worried about their driver or construction jobs, the situation is all too real for those where technology advances, coupled with global forces, have rapidly eliminated thousands of white-collar jobs. One example that comes to mind is in the area of chip design. During the past decade, particularly in the past five years, many jobs from companies such as Intel, AMD, and others have gone away. Instead Apple, Google, and Amazon are making customized chips for their own highly specific applications. This eliminates the need for many generic chips, which are now replaced by highly customized chips that have specific applications in the context of a companys own product lines.

A similar situation is happening with the consulting and staffing companies (IT Outsourcing). With major shifts happening in the IT industry due to cloud, mobility, AI, and other advances the locus of control has shifted from the CIO to the individual businesses or functional organizations. In the past massive ERP installations consumed large resources for installations, operations, and maintenance. Now with the web-based applications end users are directly plugging into the services (SaaS) provided by the cloud vendors, drastically diminishing the role of the traditional IT staff.

All of these factors are forcing professionals caught in these careers to rethink their future and consider non-linear career progression plans for them to stay employed and productively create value. Having worked with many clients with their re-inventions the following strategies are recommended to launch your own reinvention and to put your career on a new growth path:

1.Shifting your Mindset: When changing careers it is important to understand your current mindset and also the mindset required to convey to the decision-makers that you have not only shifted your original mindset, but are already living in the new mindset.

Let me give an example. During he past several years I have had a few clients in partner-level positions in well-established strategic consulting firms. They had spent much of their adult careers in strategic consulting and had risen to the partnership roles. They feared continued consolidation in the consulting industry and wanted to protect their employment. They yearned to go into the corporate world as senior executives, but had no experience running organizations or businesses. I call this the Greek-Roman dichotomy. Why? Because strategic consultants are like Greek philosophers who are good at conceptualizing ideas, uncovering problems, and writing reports about how to solve them.

What corporations need, on the other hand, in their executive ranks are Romans who know how to fight a battle and get things done. Each segment uses different language (see # 2 below) in how they communicate their experiences and how they play out their roles. So, for the Greeks to make their foray into the corporate executive suites where Romans are respected, it required us to work together to change their DNA to instinctively know how to use the right Roman lexicon. We did not just do this sitting with a glossary or a dictionary, but by forcing them to undertake internal initiatives in their current firms to execute a major change in how their business operated. This included changing the status quo and showing the result of their change as successful. Although in each case this took about 9-12 months to achieve the DNA change we wanted each of the career changes to be successful. These executives have now gone on to become C-level players in their respective corporations in a few years after their corporate migration.
2.Using the right Language: Although mindset shift is a major undertaking when making a career change, knowing how to use the right language is also equally important. Although it is less taxing than shifting your mindset, knowing the right language can make the difference between success and failure.

Let me give an example: A Senior Development Manager saw no growth opportunities in his own company or even outside. So, he decided to purse Program Management roles to head the Program Management office as a career path for growth. Although he learned the project management skills by getting certified he continued to think like a line manager with responsibility for 10-20 engineers, as he previously had. In going through the interview practice sessions his responses to typical project management challenges focused on people (as a manager he knew how to manage them) and not the process (as a Project Manager is required). It took many hours of interview practice for him to change his language from people-focused responses to process-focuses responses, because as project managers your focus is to manage the process. In a metrixed organization people are managed by the respective section managers (as he once was), who loan these resources to project managers.
3.Understanding Use Cases: One of the key elements of success in making a career change is the deep knowledge of the right use cases and user stories. This requires venturing out first-hand in the domain that you want to penetrate and having first-hand conversations with thought leaders, customers, and those who work with customers. Merely talking to these communities is not enough to understand the use cases, but probing deeply into their mindsets, challenging their view points, and offering what-if scenarios in a dialog format can help deepen your customer understanding and framing of the use-cases. It is the articulation of these use-cases and customer stories that will carry you to the checkered flag in your race to change your career.
4.Showing the Evidence: This step involves that you have actually provided leadership to drive an initative to success. Without this actual evidence you may come across as someone who bring bookish knowledge to the interview and has no actual experience to make your role produce the outcomes they are looking for. In the case of the strategic consultants above, who wanted to migrate to corporate executive jobs what won the day for them was showcasing both their clients consulting engagements where they initiated major changes and succeeded in implementing those changes with clients resources AND showcasing the changes they made in their own company as they ran their consulting business.
5.Resetting Expectations: When making a career change, especially at a senior level, it is tempting to expect to land at or above your current level and salary. This may NOT always be possible. Especially, when you are making a change in a technology space where you are pursuing new technology and where what you learned using your previous technology simply does not translate (an example may be going from licensed software business to subscription-based SaaS business). In such cases, sometimes, you may have to accept a lower station to re-establish yourself and then reclaim your lost momentum, once you get the hang of your new station. Although this is not always required, but being open to such a possibility can make the transition into a new career much more stress-free.
In a rapidly changing world of the job market making preemptive career changes is a skill that will protect you from becoming obsolete and having to retire when you are neither prepared nor ready. Using some of the strategies outlined in this blog with real examples of career changes may help you prepare to make such a change on your own!

Good luck!

About Author

Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader.

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