Are you striving continuously to carve a career for yourself? Well, if you do, are there times you are disappointed at the path it appears to lead you into.
Despair not !!! If you step back and look at a 10-12 year span of your career, you will observe some amazing patterns. As you analyze and recollect the circumstances, you will actually notice whether you were consistent in your ambitions or not.
Your career is an NP-hard problem (*) (If you want to understand that gobbledygook, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hard). In order to analyze it, you need to decompose it into smaller temporal phases and make sense of each portion [That would be local optimization for your career planning]. Now, string together the themes from each of these smaller phases and voila... you have your global solution.
This pattern will tell you about yourself, your goals, perseverance, attitude and aptitude. It will also lead you to extrapolate what your future steps should be.
As an example, my career seems to follow a 3-4 year cycle. I see distinct themes in each cycle. The first four years went in building software applications, troubleshooting bugs, addressing customer issues. In short, the theme was "Down in the weeds". The second 4-year term saw myself taking on cross-geography initiatives and "building small, efficient and effective teams". The third was about setting up a new office location grounds-up and "developing the organization" in multiple dimensions. The 4th cycle saw me participate in the "Company-Wide Strategic direction-setting" discussions including mergers/acquisitions among other things.
As I analyze this data further, it demonstrates a certain course of progression. It gives a fair picture of my goals, attitude and aptitude. But, what does that tell me about the upcoming 5th 4-year career term? I have a choice - to continue through the trajectory or to make a disruptive shift onto a lateral career plate. I would start by listing the objectives for this phase as well as for the overall career progression. I would then look at some influencing life-style variables. Hopefully that will give me the necessary data to arrive at a logical answer...
In conclusion, the science of career planning and optimization is indeed fun and challenging. There are no proven answers for the problem. There are only approximations and educated guesstimations. Who would you trust to solve such a problem, if not yourself?
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(*) At each point of time in your career you have multiple choices to make that will impact your next state.
1. Since there exists the possibility of multiple results for a specific action in a specific situation, this is classified as a non-deterministic problem
2. Evaluating each possible outcome for each situation and action has a "polynomial time" complexity
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