"Where do you want to be 5 years from now?"

Many times, I have been challenged with the clichéd career question – “where do you want to be 5 years from now?”. Most of us when posed with this question make the mistake of somehow boxing ourselves in the current company, industry and domain. For example, I can easily think of myself as where I will be five years from now and sure enough, I will limit my thoughts to being at Yahoo, even after 5 years from now. I would try to hold a crystal ball and forecast that I would be doing such and such thing at so and so position and role. Not many of us do think that this may entail leaving our current job, company and domain and be doing something else. We can't even forecast how many jobs we will hop or change in these five ensuing years.

 I didn't really pay much attention to the underlying actual theme until I had a very good and somewhat scrutinious discussion with Mark Morrissey, our SVP of Production Engineering at Yahoo. Another person who help ignite this discussion with his insights is Sarang Kirpekar, DVP, Sears Holding and a very good friend. I thank both these gentlemen for their insights into this discussion.

I realize that as you are growing in your career – it is likely that first few jobs are spent in wilderness. You are very lucky if you are Mark Zukerberg, David Filo, Jerry Yang, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and so on. For, then your first job is your last job as well. But most of us meander and waver through first few jobs and then land into something that we consider our calling. For example, you may work for a web hosting company, then a clinical trials company and then land up at some stage in an Internet company like Yahoo.

While you are traversing through these peaceful first few jobs, your focus is primarily on gaining your technical skills. These skills are in your domain – your domain could be DBA, programmer, system administrator etc. So you join as novice DBA then transition to junior DBA. After few years and hard work, you get to call yourself Senior DBA. Few more years under your belt and you call yourself a DB architect. Yet few more years, you start considering yourself the best thing that happened to databases since Oracle 6.0. Sure, not all have that big an ego and vanity. :)

I call this specific period of gaining your chops in technical domain as X Axis or horizontal skill band. I also call this as your first love. Ok, not first love but, at least, second love.

While traversing through this career land, you also navigate through multiple vertical domains – retail, ecommerce, health or internet etc. While moving and learning nuances of each of these domains, you fall in love with one that challenges and excites you the most. You may also end up calling this as your third love.

I will refer to this as Y axis or vertical domain band.

Once you have discovered both X and Y axes for your professional life, it is like you have arrived. Yes, it is indeed that. You have now got hold of your x and y coordinates of professional life or at least handles that will enable you to take your career further.

I also call this discovery as “discovery of professional graticule”. Be glad if you are able to achieve this - Why? Because many of us pass through professional life without having discovered or achieved this professional graticule. Without this, you are like a rudderless ship which may have immense horsepower and steaming ahead on all engines, alas, without accurate directivity! 

Hopefully you are not one of those unfortunates and have discovered your professional graticule. Once you have discovered your professional graticule, the professional journey is very easy. All you need to do is move the horizontal bar on vertical scale making your graticule move up. I have tried my best to summarize this in following diagram.

Professional Graticule

As you grow in your career, remaining within your professional graticule, the professional graticule box progresses. For example, from a manager through director and finally to an SVP, this professional graticule marches on as shown in the figure below.

Progress in your domain via your professional graticule

Sometimes there are small setbacks. These setbacks are due to your desire to chase money as opposed to professional excellence. So you end up taking a pay cut, throw away your rank & standing and join a startup. Nothing wrong with that. It is just that during this period, your forward march on a graph seems somewhat arrested – it may well be compensated by the forward march in your bank balance, so no complains J.

What is the point I am trying to make in this discussion?

The point is very simple and somewhat obvious – the sooner you discover your professional graticule the better it is for your career and professional life.

Like I said earlier, many a professionals pass through an entire professional lifetime wandering from one job to another and in the course of that journey going through different vertical domains. Some people, like Jack Welch, may call this “all round development” but I call this as plain journey into being an executive as opposed to being a specialist. GE is one company that still encourages its leaders to become good executives by having gone through the myriad rungs of leadership in various industries in GE’s portfolio.

Navy also somewhat encourages that – you command surface ships – graduating from smaller missile boats to missile corvettes to frigates, destroyers and cruisers (in that order, perhaps) and then if you are lucky, command a battleship and an aircraft carrier before becoming fleet commander and eventually Naval chief.

I am of the opinion - and you need not really take it as the best of the option - that one should figure out one's professional graticule and then focus all his or her energy on that graticule and growth in that X and Y intersection. This gives you the most positive growth since you are very directional and not really meandering from one career to another.

In one case, you are “Jack of all, master of none” and that is perfectly acceptable and understandable. In another case, and where you stay in your professional graticule, you tend to become “jack of one and master of that very one”. Pick your choice!