Career is a major part of our active life, as it consumes more than half of our waking time. Career plays a vital role in our overall well-being. It also defines who we are, viz., our social standing. Yet, we do not follow a structured approach to manage our career issues. We rely on our self-opinionated attitude or prefer trial-and-error methods to take career decisions.
There is a difference between a career and a great career. There are individuals with almost similar profiles, but at vastly different standings on the success scale. We often come across individuals with virtually same qualifications, experience and skill-sets; but their career positions are poles apart. We cannot brush aside such variations by simply blaming the favorite whipping boy, the luck factor.
Ordinary people rarely review their career plans. They rarely revise their career goals. You are not an ordinary person, as you have already taken the first step aimed at upgrading yourself. You know that you are different from the lot. You have the potential to achieve a great deal in your career. But, having potential and realizing it optimally are two different things. Potential is within you, and it is for you to make best use of it.
The basic premise of the Career Change Guide is that we all have the potential to influence our career success, and we ought to make the best use of our potential. The objective of the book is to make you career conscious, to help you to take charge of your future career, and get the job of your dreams. While studying this book, you will discover parts of you, you never knew existed. The purpose of the book is to enable professionals to create a dynamic career plan and empower them to realize it. And in their career journey, it is intended to help them– all the way in all the ways.
Professional-progress and personal-progress ought to progress together. But, more often than not, personal-progress takes a backseat. We are surely for the professional empowerment, but not at the expense of self-factors. Professional success has no meaning if you are not happy or cannot make others happy. It is not an either/or choice between career success and happiness. The right career strategy aims at a synergistic approach to seek the both. It expects us to clear the decks at the conceptual level. Otherwise, our unbridled quest for success would only drag us deeper into career dilemmas.
This book provides you enough inputs to enable you to effectively deal with your career dilemmas so that you can smartly monitor the future to facilitate the professional and personal progress. You just have to join the dots to figure out the way forward from your career crossroads to your dream career.
I dedicate this book to my professional friends who pestered me to bring out a career change guide based on “Taking the Challenge of Career Change” part of my career-planning book Vision Revision. The credit for many features aimed at enhancing the psychological impact of the material, many times even at the expense of syntax, goes to them who have tested this material and offered invaluable feedback and suggestions to make this work more practical and useful. The mandate I have followed is not to aim at an interesting read, but to take care of your career interests. The objective is to ensure that it empowers you to manage your career successfully and that you are amply motivated to take your career decisions intelligently.
In the career jungle, you have the options to either perish professionally or play your part proficiently. It is up to you to just survive, or strive to thrive.