The ugly duckling’s career graph

This is a true story, which illustrates a rule rather than an exception, but of a rather less apparent and seemingly paradoxical aspect, of professional growth. It may help you to strengthen yourself or your team members, while they are going through tough work situations and assignments, and see the light at the end of the tunnel... a long tunnel perhaps, but one, at the end of which, you will emerge amply rewarded!

In the mid-1990s, the job market for ERP consultants in India was exploding. Production engineers with significant experience on the shop-floor, who were earning about INR 15,000 a month would get retrained as SAP consultants and suddenly get jobs in the US for USD 100K+ a year… similarly, Chartered Accountants and Sales Managers would get jobs as ERP consultants for finance and distribution, and so on. Of course, the fact that this was big news, ensured that tons of professionals of all shapes, sizes, experience levels and qualifications were doing their best to become ERP consultants in a hurry, so the competition was also getting fierce.

Around the same time, I was trying to get my bootstrap business running and would do anything (well, nearly!) for a buck… one of the areas I dabbled in was placement (also called executive search, recruitment consultancy and so on). It was then that a friend walked into my tiny office saying, “koi acchi naukri dila re” (“get me a good job”). This friend (let’s call him Subbu) had an undergrad in mechanical engineering from a good university, and after three years of work, had gone to a top B-school for an MBA, after which he’d already moved two companies in a matter of months. Seeing his CV, I remarked that while his qualifications were good, his work experience post-MBA was insignificant, and quite bizarrely, he had not even mentioned his work experience for three years between his undergrad and MBA. When I asked Subbu why he had not written about his pre-MBA job, a shadow passed across his face.

With a pained expression, he told me how he’d worked in a “really depressing” (according to him!) public sector unit (PSU) which manufactured electronic products – a bureaucratic behemoth, where everyone wore a khaki uniform, went to lunch at the sound of the factory bell, took the bus home at the next bell, and were programmed to do almost the same thing everyday, until their retirement about 30 years later. “I was lucky to get out of there”, said Subbu, “they actually put me in materials management, which was the most boring place in the company, and I had to track inventory of thousands of parts with a foxpro program. Even in business school, a guest lecturer once said the dullest employees in a factory are put into inventory management, and everyone looked at me. All my colleagues in that department were double my age, and had no intentions of moving anywhere in life”, he said, wincing.

Something told me that it was important to include Subbu’s “depressing” PSU experience in his CV, as after all, it was 3 years of honest work, not to be trifled with. We argued, I won, and we had a new CV version.

A couple of weeks later, at an alumni dinner, I ran into a very senior alumnus, Chakravarthy (nicknamed Chax), who was a legend in the IT industry. Senior partner in a big-5 consulting firm, Chax was a rock star CEO, heading a team of several hundred top notch ERP professionals bagging all the big consulting and implementation contracts in the market. Chax asked me if I could find some good ERP consultants who were about my age and experience level – “JK, just so we don’t waste each other’s time”, he said, “don’t throw any fresher CVs at me, you know, like bright youngsters with degrees from great colleges and no work experience. I’m sure we’ll need them too, one day, but right now, I need people with solid experience in difficult areas of work, who have dirtied their hands… know what I mean?”

“What difficult areas, Chax”, I asked.

“Stuff like materials management”, he said, “for instance, people who have actually done it for a few years, in big manufacturing units… not learnt it from textbooks”…. EUREKA!! ...VOILA!! ...WHATEVER!!

The rest is history… Subbu joined Chax’s elite team (only because his work experience gave him a decisive edge over competitors), went on to become a national, regional and then a global tech resource, certified several times over in all kinds of stuff, and now, although he has moved out of ERP, he heads a 1,000+ man delivery center for a large global tech consulting organization.

For me, the moral of the story is simple: when you are doing the toughest, dirtiest work, it is highly probable that you are actually adding the most value to yourself, and in the process, differentiating your profile most sharply from competition.

Indeed, the software program manager who has never spent days and nights coding, the brand manager who has never sweated it out in field sales, the production manager who has not been on the shop-floor, the finance manager who has never pored over books of accounts, the investment banker who has not done hours of back-breaking research, the HR manager who has not resolved serious conflicts, the academic who has not spent hours in the classroom, the social worker who has not worked at the grassroots… all run one common risk – they may just NOT have the credibility to stand their ground, when their fundamentals are challenged. Every senior manager worth his salt, always has tales to tell about the real tough projects he or she has worked on, and the more you dirty your hands, the more you learn, the more confident you become… a fringe benefit is, the more war-stories you can recount to youngsters when you become the boss:)

Unfortunately, the image buildup about work in industry, is often inversely related to the actual value of work done – it is not fashionable to work hard, it is better to have the bells and whistles of a swank job. But the job that feels great in the short run, could be your greatest enemy in the long run – beware the cushy high-paying job, in the early stages of your career, where you are hardly breaking a sweat – it could just be the virus which destroys your career! On the other hand, if you are slogging it out in the trenches, sweating, bleeding and of course, cursing liberally, then, every minute you spend, will add oodles of value to your CV, your confidence and your personality. Not only that, as Subbu and I learned, you can, and MUST, talk with pride about the hard work you’ve done instead of being embarrassed by it! All you need is, the tonic to keep going when you are going through the grind – for this, you could use auto-suggestion to motivate yourself, like Johann Cryuff, the great Dutch footballer… “While I run uphill, I tell myself, I am running downhill!”