subject: ENJOY YOUR JOB [print this page] Author: Vikram Karve Author: Vikram Karve
ARE YOU ENJOYING YOUR JOB CHOOSING A CAREER PART 2 By VIKRAM KARVE Continued from CHOOSING A CAREER PART 1 Musings on Work-Life Balance Your Skills, Your Interests, Your Values, Your Career ORIENTATION IN LIFE If your want to enjoy your work take care to ensure that your choice of career is in alignment with your ORIENTATION IN LIFE. Your orientation in life comprises three factors: SKILLS, INTERESTS and VALUES. If you choose a career that enables you achieve success facilitating optimal utilization of your best skills, doing the kinds of work that relate to your favourite interests and in consonance with your core values, you will derive total work-life balance and job satisfaction. In order to find out your orientation in life you have to know yourself.
Go to some quiet place, sit down comfortably, close your eyes, and reflect. SKILLS
As a first step to determining your Orientation in Life focus on the various skills you might have. Introspect and list your SOFT SKILLS and HARD SKILLS.
Soft Skills: pertain to the intuitive, creative and emotional right side of the brain
Hard Skills: emanate from the analytical and logical left side of the brain.
Are you a Soft Skills person or a Hard Skills person or a hybrid blend of both? Which types of skills predominate? Think of your best skills. Prioritize them and make a list of all your skills in order of precedence. Now list all your interests and put them in order of your preference, just as you did with skills. INTERESTS How do you discover your interests? Assume you have enough leisure and plenty of time and resources what would you do? How you like to spend your leisure gives a clue to your interests. Will the career you choose enable you to satisfy your interests at the workplace or will you have enough leisure and resources to pursue them on your own in your spare time. VALUES Now, focus on discovering your values. Values are core beliefs which guide and motivate attitudes and behaviour.
When you value something you want it (or want it to happen). Values are relatively permanent desires. Values are our subjective reactions to the world around us.
Values are answers to the why question. You keep on asking why questions until you reach a point where you no longer want something for the sake of something else. At this point you have arrived at a value. Lets take an example I was once teaching a Post Graduate Professional Programme at a premier university, a centre of excellence, and I asked a student, Why are you doing this academic course? To gain qualifications, he answered. Why do you want to gain qualifications? To succeed in my career. Why do you want to succeed in your career? To reach the top. Why do you want to reach the top? To get power. Why do want do you want power? To control people, he answered. Why do you want to control people? I want to control people. Why? I like to control people. Why? Just for the sake of it I like controlling people, he said and further whys elicited similar responses related to control. Control for the sake of control thats when you discover your value. I realized that control was one of his cardinal values and maybe he was a future megalomaniac in the making! The same line of questioning of persons undergoing higher education may reveal values like knowledge, money, status, standard of living, ambition, achievement, growth, reputation, excellence, fame. Your personal list of values may include values like honesty, integrity, loyalty, prestige, happiness, friendship, family life, achievement, independence, education, power, money, independence, freedom and so on. Now prioritize your values in order of importance to discover your CORE VALUES - your most important cardinal values. Remember, there cannot be any partial values; for example: you cannot be 50% honest (half-honest) either you are honest or you are not honest! Your values are possibly the most important thing to consider when you're choosing an occupation or workplace. That is because you can compromise your values but you cannot change your values. If you do not take your values into account when planning your career, there's a good chance you will dislike your work and therefore not enjoy it. SELECTING A CAREER OR JOB Introspect over your skills, interests and values. If you have conscientiously created and prioritized your lists, you have learned something about yourself and ascertained your orientation in life. Whilst considering and selecting a career you must thoroughly evaluate as to what degree the career-attributes are compatible with your orientation in life. Lets take an example. Suppose your priority skills include hard skills like mathematical and analytical ability, and soft skills like leadership and communication skills. Your interests include travel, adventure, photography and good food. And your most important values are family life, prestige and achievement. Now lets consider various career options. Consider a career as a deck officer in the merchant navy. Your skills and interests seem to be ideally suited but there is mismatch, a conflict, between the demands of the career in the merchant navy and your most cherished value Family Life. Perhaps, if your most important values were money, independence and prestige, the overall harmony and compatibility of your values, skills and interests with the career-attributes would have made merchant navy an ideal career option for you. In practical life you may not be always able to avoid value versus career conflict in all cases but being aware of this fact will help you come to terms with realities and mitigate the conflict and also contemplate a career-shift in consonance with your value orientation whenever feasible. Your values are the most important and critical aspect of ones career orientation. If you want to enhance certain skills, you can work on it and acquire those skills. Similarly, you can change your interests or develop new interests, devoting time and resources to those interests you would like to create, acquire or strengthen.
Skills can be learned, interests can be developed, but values are intrinsic. It is very difficult to change your core values. You may compromise your values, but you cannot change them. Before you choose your career, introspect and ascertain the compatibility, congruence and harmony between the career and your orientation in life [your skills, interests and values].
Dont make a hasty decision or you may find yourself on the wrong road and then it may be too late to turn back.
Devoid of intrinsic motivation to purse a career which is not in harmony with ones orientation in life, but caught up in the need to gain parental affection, materialistic rewards, extrinsic recognition, peer pressure and societal acceptance, young people often enter careers that may not offer them true inner happiness and fulfilment that evolves from harmonious work-life balance. Thus, though they may appear outwardly successful, inwardly they lament over the reality of inner dissonance owing to work-life imbalance. [To be continued] VIKRAM KARVE Copyright Vikram Karve 2009 Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. http://www.linkedin.com/in/karvevikramkarve@sify.comAbout the Author:
VIKRAM KARVE educated at IIT Delhi, ITBHU and The Lawrence School Lovedale, is an Electronics and Communications Engineer by profession, a Human Resource and Training Manager by occupation, a Teacher by vocation, a Creative Writer by inclination and a Foodie by passion. An avid blogger, he has written a number of fiction short stories and creative non-fiction articles in magazines and journals for many years before the advent of blogging. His delicious foodie blogs have been compiled in a book Appetite for a Stroll. Vikram lives in Pune with his family and pet Doberman girl Sherry, with whom he takes long walks thinking creative thoughts.
