Creating Your Career Graph Timeline

After creating mySWLD matrix, I will now discuss how you can create myTimeline – another self-analysis tool that I’ve invented to help my people professionally grow. This is for you to see who you are, what you have, where you want to be, and where you are heading…

Let me ask you something. What’s your Ambition in life? What do you want to be in your life? What is your professional goal? Few of us have no idea. Many of us associate our goals to certain designations or compensations or acquiring certain physical luxuries. And most of us do not associate/correlate our goals with our mySWLD matrix.

Knowing your Ambition is an integral part of knowing who you are. You are likely to board a wrong Plane, unless you know your destination. The ability to self-motivate and succeed in life is also rooted in one's level of ambition. So, have a date with your inner self and think (think deep) about it.

And when you know what your ambition or goal is, rewind your clock and cast you mind back Two years. Now think hard and note down who you were and what used to describe you at that point of your life. What were your strengths, skill-set and USP? What all were you known for? What was your value and reputation in your team/organization/college? Let’s call it the “starting point” of myTimeLine.

Now come forward 6 months on this timeline. And think and list down the Delta – what did you gain and what you lost (wrt the starting point on the timeline) with time. You may have learnt/gained certain new skills, and you may have increased both depth as well as width in certain expertise areas. And of-course you became more experienced and more mature (as you had become 6 months older in age). But at the same time, you may have lost edge/command over certain skills. Your expertise area may have gone thru revision or may have become obsolete (and totally replaced with newer technology/process/methodology), and your skill may have become outdated. You may have become rusty or you may even have forgot what you had learnt (and remembered) 6 months back. And as you grew older you may have lost some bit of your energy, enthusiasm, and spark/curiosity to learn new. With more personal responsibilities your way, you may have even lost some of the time-bandwidth available for your professional life. Note down all these +ve and -ve deltas on this point of myTimeLine.

Repeat the above step of identifying deltas for remaining 6-month-interval points, until you reach to the present. Then, starting from the starting point, draw a career skills/expertise graph line. This is your Career Graph Timeline (refer to it as myTimeline).

Now see if your myTimeline is actually moving towards your “goal point”. If not, take it as a wakeup call, and take whatever corrective actions are necessary to bring it back on track (might mean taking a U-Turn, or a simple diversion, or something in between). Remember your mission, your goal and your objective. And tweak your strategy and tactics to reach there. Sooner you realize where you wanted to reach, where you are actually headed, what went wrong, and how to fix it, the better (and easier) it would be for you achieve what you had dreamt for…