Career Growth

I never gave a serious thought to this but very recently I bumped into an informal meeting in my office that made me put my thoughts down. There were these guys who were chatting up about what a career path would be for techincal writers. Well, I joined in give my perpective from software engineer point of view. A normal career path would be to go through the rungs of the proffesional ladder. Each rung has a designation to it. We would spend sometine on each of the rung before moving onto the next. Each step has a corresponding responsibility and compensation package. Some climb it faster others at their own pace. Is this what is known as career path? Well may be.

I choose a sligthly different definition for myself. All of us start as beginers, we slowly get to know the trade and then we begin to master it. Once we have mastered in terms of quality, we try to master it in terms of quantity and time.Now we are delivering at 1x, 100% of our capability at that level. Then what? It is then that we move on to the next significant role of a senior, a coach or a manager. Transfer your knowledge to another, bring him( or her) to a level where they can take care of the micro level things and you move to the stage of looking at the macros of an issue. This would also involve assigning, discussing, analyzing and checking what others are doing. The combinged productivity would be >1x. You being the brain behind the activities. The challenge is to maintain the same (if not better) quality of work. If there are 'n' number of people in your project then your cumulative output should be close to 'nx'. Ideally nx.And once you have mastered things at this level, you move onto take much larger issues or a larger chunck of the same task. This was my point of view.

One of the guys pointed out that there could be more creative or talented guys in the team. Are you limiting their ability to 'x'? Hmm.... may yes, may be no. Software is different from tech writing. Software though being creative, ironically requries a lot of discipline. Discipline in planning, designing and coding. Just being creative is not enough, ensuring that implementation is in line with the requirements is mandatory and this requires discipline. And definetly, working with more talented people gives you a better perpective, enabling you to up your original '1x'. The challenge is to continually grow internally, designations are an external validation. For some lucky few oppurtunites, to grow, comeby and they fill into it, others have to make their oppurtunities.
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