How I Stumbled On My Dream Job

All of us have a dream job. Most of us don't get it. Result: dissatisfaction with work. Srini tries to connect the dots of his career story for an important lesson on deliberate and emergent strategies.

Show Notes

Like most Indian students of the nineties, I pursued my higher education options based on what was generally known and acceptable. Becoming an engineer and MBA was (and continues to be) popular. My first job was also in a sought after field: management consulting.

What most careers - particularly, successful ones - don't reveal are the dreams that didn't materialise. The dreams that we might have had as children. Or even later during college.

Is it then a failure if we don't obtain our dream jobs? I have written about my first major encounter with failure during my MBA placements. As I shared during the first episode of this podcast: 80% of young managers did not get the job that they wanted on campus and only 48% of them are satisfied with their current jobs.

Are we doomed to remain dissatisfied, pining for the dream job that wasn't to be?

What if the current job is your dream job... you just don't know it yet?

I look back at my career journey... a roller-coaster of sorts over three decades of choices and misses. And how I learnt (from later Prof. Clayton Christensen) that the principles of strategy (deliberate vs. emergent) apply even to our careers.

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What is VALYOU: Create Personal Competitive Advantage in Your Career?

Srinivasa Addepalli and all the other gurus at GlobalGyan Academy of Management Education share their secrets of how to build a successful career. Speaking from their years of experience across sectors, geographies and functions, they offer practical insights on how you can create competitive advantage for yourself. In the future of work, you will face competition from not only others like you but also talented people across the world, and even machines! Most young people believe that graduating from a well-known college with a coveted degree will set them up for life, but that is no longer a guarantor of success. Firstly, a majority of smart young people do not get admission into such colleges. And even if they do, what they learn during those few years is often meaningless compared to what they would need to do over the next 30 to 40 years. Creating competitive advantage requires us to learn new, relevant skills but that is not all; just like businesses need to think of the 4Ps (and more), individuals need to work on multiple dimensions to create their own strategy to win in the marketplace for talent. Discover how you can uniquely design and build your career, from those who have succeeded and failed at doing so.