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?

As I was telling you in my previous post, last week I had the opportunity to deliver a talk about my professional career to a class of secondary school kids.

I had a hard time preparing the presentation, partly because I generally find it difficult to talk about myself (and I don't like pointing at myself as an example of anything), and partly because I didn't have a clear idea of how to express what I wanted to convey. At this stage, I know for a fact that storytelling is not my thing, so I had to find another way.

Luckily, a couple of days before the talk I had a chat with a friend (thanks Quique!) who really helped me to put myself in those teenagers' shoes; we spoke about how at that age, typically only a few teens have a good idea of what they would like to study in college, or what they'd like to do for a living; most often, they don't have a clue. If on top of that we add the ever-growing amount of available options, and the rate at which the workplace landscape keeps changing, we end up with a level of uncertainty that's a lot higher than for previous generations. And that's overwhelming.

All this gave me an idea, a metaphor I could use to explain what I wanted to convey to them...

I remembered Dora the Explorer.

If you've ever watched an episode of Dora, you'll remember that she always has a mission to accomplish, a goal to achieve, and that she keeps finding challenges and difficulties along the way, but in the end she always gets to achieve the goal (and to celebrate!)

So, what does Dora have (apart from her friend Boots) that helps her to overcome those challenges and difficulties?

First of all, a map.

Map used to show Dora the way at the beginning of every episode, almost always with three places she had to get through before arriving at her destination:

But the thing is, Dora's map was always right, it knew exactly what she would find along the path... Obviously, in real life we know that "the map" (that is, our plan) is just for orientation purposes, and, following the reasoning from last week's post, something like this is most likely to happen:

So, you know, as I see it, it's great to have a map, a plan, especially at the beginning. It can help us, it can point us in the right direction, but it's not going to solve all our problems, so if we don't have a plan, it's not the end of the world either, the way will reveal itself in due course.

First message: it's OK if you don't have a plan, it's going to change anyway.

But then, what can we do to prepare?

This is where we get to the second object Dora always carried with her, which to me is a lot more important and a lot more interesting than the map. Do you remember what it was?

A backpack.

A backpack full of all kinds of tools. And every time a challenge appeared, Dora opened her backpack and took out the perfect tool for the occasion, the one that would allow her to solve the problem.

Second message: we may not know the exact path we will need to walk, but in the meantime we can get our backpacks ready, filling them with tools that will be useful for work an well as for our personal life and relationships.

Those "tools" can be:

• Natural talents and abilities that we already have, and that we can continue to work on and improve.
• Things we learn in a formal environment (primary and secondary school, college, workplace, etc.), and I'm not referring only to what's in the books (though that's important as well), but also many other skills we learn while we go through these experiences.
• Things we learn in less formal environments, and that we seek for ourselves: extra curricular activities, interests, hobbies...

In summary: everything we learn in the different environments we interact with gets incorporated into our backpack. And out of all those tools, the most useful ones are the ones called "transferrable skills", because they can be applied to any professional or personal environment. Here are a few examples of the most typical ones:

• Communication and presentation skills
• Organizational skills
• Quality focus and attention to detail
• Adaptability to change
• Collaboration and teamwork

And my favourite, the best one in my opinion, because to helps to develop all the others: self-awareness and self-management.

What are your thoughts on this backpack idea? What tools do you have in yours? And which ones would you like to acquire?

One of the many things I love about the company I work for is the bunch of volunteering opportunities available to us. For a few years now I've been collaborating with Junior Achievement, an international institution who establishes links between students in primary and post-primary education and professionals from the corporate world.

The idea is for us volunteers to visit primary and secondary schools and deliver training sessions and other events to the kids, not only to bring them new knowledge (though that's part of it, especially in areas like economics, business, science, technology, engineering and maths), but mainly to be a role model for them; that way, they can see that staying in the education system pays off, as it gives them more chances to find a good job.

In previous years, I've done training sessions on science, technology and the like, but my task for this week was something very different: delivering a talk about my professional career to a secondary school class, in order to inspire them at this crucial moment when they're starting to decide what to do with their life.

My professional career.

Twenty years, more or less, since I started to work.

To be honest, at the beginning I didn't have a clear idea of what I could say that they would find inspiring, or at least somewhat helpful... How could I become a useful example for them? What did I learn in all these years that's worth telling? What would have helped me to hear when I was their age? I slowly started to dig deeper and deeper, and a common thread started emerging; an idea, a message that I would also like to share with you.

This diagram is a great illustration of "how life is supposed to go" (a perfect straight line from the starting point to the end) versus "how life actually goes" (an extremely whacky and bendy line, full of twists, turns and even loops, from the starting point to the end).

This is as true for professional careers as it is for anything else in life: I realized this first hand as I was preparing my presentation, and I noticed I had drawn my trajectory as a perfect arrow from left to right, with significant milestones at regular intervals, when in reality there were a good few twists and turns, many of them unexpected, coming from outside, but also a few that I decided to initiate myself, from the inside.

Luckily, my presentation also had to include a section on "successes and failures", so that's where I took the opportunity to explain a few of those twists and turns along the years, which, depending on how you look at them, can be considered failures, in the sense that things didn't turn out how I expected them to.

And I said "depending on how you look at them" because this black and white thinking that states that things are either a success or a failure doesn't seem accurate to me; I prefer looking at it this way:

This other diagram shows us "what most people think", which is that success and failure are mutually exclusive, and that failure derails you from the path of success, versus "what successful people know", which is that what we call failure is nothing more than feedback indicating which way not to go, so that we can try different routes and end up finding the right way, the way of success.

And this is something I would have greatly benefited from if I had heard it twenty years ago: that it's OK to make mistakes (at work and in life), that getting it wrong every now and then is completely normal, and it's even necessary, because it allows us to learn and make progress in life, figuring out our own path.

How about you? What do you think about these two diagrams?

• If you've been in the workforce for a few years already, are these hypotheses true in your case as well? What would be the shape of your professional career, if you were to draw it? What twists, turns or blockers have you found along the way?

• And if you've only recently joined the workforce, or haven't joined yet, how does it feel when you hear your professional career will probably be this chaotic? What do you think could help you to prepare a little better?

Next week I'll tell you something else that came to my mind when preparing for the talk: a way to think about your professional career that I hope will provide you with some fresh ideas and practical tools.