This weekend at home, we´ve been talking about university courses. Irene, my eldest daughter, is finishing secondary school this year, so it´s time for her to choose what she wants to study, and her sister Alicia will be in the same situation in just two years.

(This photo is from Maynooth University, which is close to our house. It´s a modern university, though it also has some older buildings. I walked around the area a few days ago, and I really liked the atmosphere.)

In fairness, choosing a college course is a turning point in a teenager´s life; it may even be the first big decision many of them face. And it can be quite an overwhelming process, filled with doubt and uncertainty. Those with a clear first option will feel pressured to get the necessary marks, and they may obsess over whether they will get in or not. But what about those who don´t even know which way to go? Even more doubts, pressure and stress, trying to sort out their thoughts and choose wisely.

Because, the thing is, whatever you study in college will determine your professional life once you´re done...

All of this reminds me of the presentation I gave last year on career paths (you can read the articles here and here), where I tried to calm down the kids to an extent in that regard. When it comes to important decisions like this one, it´s natural to feel the need to get it right and find the perfect solution, in this case, choosing the ideal career path... But the reality is that we don´t have all the information, plus things don´t depend solely on us, plus the perfect solution as such doesn´t exist; what does exist are different options that will give us different results and learnings..

Luckily, nowadays, choosing a particular career or profession doesn´t necessarily mean getting stuck there for life: reinvention is very common, due to people´s own will as well as the evolution of job markets. So, in. my opinion, the most important thing is to get started somewhere (if possible, doing something you like and/or you´re good at), do your best, learn a lot, gain experience, and then, if needed, start making adjustments as you make progress.

Just to be clear, I´m not saying you should reinvent yourself and change your career path every ten minutes, OK? You will need a bit of patience and perseverance to be able to learn everything that each phase has to teach you.

And the good thing is that all the knowledge, experience and skills that we acquire in each phase we integrate without noticing, and that makes us better professionals, even if, at first sight, it may seem like some items are not relevant or not applicable to the new position or situation..

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own career path, to see if they help to make it clear:

• In college, I studied Computer Engineering; thanks to that, I learned programming, and even though programming was not my favourite activity in life (it wasn´t my hobby the same way it was for some of my friends), I was relatively good at it. My first few jobs once I finished college were as a software programmer.
• When I moved to Ireland, I also started working as a programmer, but as time went by, a few junior engineers joined my team. Over time, I started programming less and less and doing more and more analysis tasks (that is, understanding how the system works and what updates are required to do whatever is needed for each project).
• The following company that hired me (the one I´m still working for) hired me directly as a Systems Analyst.
• Typically, Systems Analyst tasks include:
  • Gathering all the user or client requirements to add functionality to a system
  • Documenting the system´s current state (as-is)
  • Defining the future state, once the new functionality is added (to-be)
  • Specify the required changes to move from current state to future state, and
  • Work with the development team to implement said changes.
• Years later, I discovered coaching, a discipline that doesn´t seem to have anything to do with systems analysis... Until we start looking at the steps of the GROW model (the most widespread model in coaching) in detail:
  • Goal – Define the goal: what do you want to achieve?
  • Reality – Explore reality, how are things right now, in relation to the goal?
  • Options – List your options: what could you do to make progress towards your goal?
  • Will or Way forward – Action plan: what are you going to do, where are you going to start?

Well, it turns out that (in general terms, and being mindful of the differences) the structure of a coaching session is not that different from the steps you follow before modifying a webpage, for example. And the structured and analytical mind I got from all these years of working as a Systems Analyst gave me a great foundation to manage my coaching sessions skillfully.

And I´ve noticed another parallel:

• Beyond individual sessions, let´s remember that coaching is, first of all, a process:
  • At the very beginning, an overall goal (the process goal) is established, and it is defined as precisely as possible.
  • Then, in each session, we identify a specific topic to work on (the session goal) related to the overall goal, and a new action plan is defined.
  • This way, each session involves taking another step towards the overall goal, evaluating the results from the previous step and course-correcting as often as needed.
• This could be compared to the way we work in Technology with Agile methodologies, for example, Scrum:
  • Each project or initiative represents a goal: implementing certain functionality in the system.
  • The team defines, for each work cycle (in Scrum this is called sprint, a set time period, for example, two weeks), a partial goal in relation to the whole effort, based on the number of tasks they estimate they can finish in the allocated time.
  • At the end of each sprint there´s a follow up on the work, the team reflects on what worked well and what didn´t, what they were able to finish and what they weren´t, the necessary adjustments are made, and the next sprint is planned.

I hope these examples illustrate a bit of what I want to convey with this post: that many of the things we learn in certain contexts can be really useful resources in other contexts, and that even if we don´t "get it right" the first time with our career path, we´ll be learning and evolving regardless, so we won´t be wasting time at all, on the contrary.

What´s your opinion on this? What skills do you have now, thanks to previous jobs or projects?