Saumyen's Pages
Nuances of Career Management in IT
(January 2019)
Rethink
When I ask my nine-year-old daughter what she would want to be, her choice is driven by her thoughts at that time. At kindergarten she told her teachers that she would become a nurse so that she is always with her doctor mother. By the time she was in class 3, she was influenced by her “Sumi teacher” and wanted to start a school for kids. The Discovery channel made her enthusiastic enough at 9 to be an astronaut! She has the whole horizon in front of her and infinite career options to choose from. I and for that matter, all of us went through the same stage in our lives. As and when we get older, the options of a career that we can choose and pursue become limited. And a more realistic time line to attain the target career option becomes clearer!
What is a career option? A career option is our dream or target profession (or may be professions) subject to our ability to achieve them. This is actually a corollary of a basic economic theory which defines demand as desire backed by ability. Hence our ability significantly influences the desired career that we look for. Career management is the approach and modus operandi to enhance one’s ability to reach his/her career aspirations or attain the best possible option (i.e. constraint optimization). As individual ability may change over time, the career management is expected to and needs to be changed accordingly.
Career management/ planning in a majority of the traditional industries in India, has been long-term and driven primarily by decades of experience in the same area of expertise. Employees of these organizations look for career options and plan for attaining the goals over 2- 3 decades of employment in the industry. I have seen my father and most from his generation people to work for one organization throughout the life!
Career planning in the Indian IT industry is different. The corporate IT world is dominated by a relatively young, energetic and aspiring group of Indians mostly with sharp intellects, technical mindsets, academic glories, professional trainings and strong social connects. Career planning here seems to have a much shorter time frame with an impatience to achieve the goals at the earliest (i.e. faster than his/her peer group).
Being in the corporate IT world for over two decades, my weekend casual chat sessions with friends and colleagues often focus on career and career management in the changing milieu of the IT industry. This paper is a product of these discussions and focuses on some characteristics that influence such behavior in this industry. The characteristics are neither exhaustive nor definitive but illustrative for our purpose.
I knew Ramesh, my ex-boss, as a tech-expert. An engineering graduate from IIT, he joined the IT industry in its early days. He was our tech guru when I joined his team 5 years later. I was surprised when he moved to sales role in a technology product company. By the next 10 years, he was heading the global sales for a large retail multinational. Today he is well set for the CEO role for the company.
Is this a unique example? No. My colleagues in the industry will have multiple such ones. However, one of Ramesh’s statements was very interesting: “I took hit in my career to move to sales as my earlier career was taking me to technical roles” According to Ramesh, we should see the long-term career goal as an aggregation of short-term career goals but we should be able to forego some of short-term goals for the long term one. He argues that many of the young industry colleagues try to maximize short term career gains, possibly in absence or visibility of a long-term career goal.
I am not here to debate whether Ramesh is right or wrong. I think the issue is bigger. Is it a deliberate attempt from professionals in IT to have a short term career plan or is it a industry phenomenon that influences this behaviour? The answer is neither easy and nor straight forward. There are two trends in the industry.
First, a significant group of the young talents has been joining the IT industry after graduation in engineering or technical subjects and thanks to the recruitment drives by the major IT companies, they join in batches. For most companies, this group of freshers (1-4 years of experience) accounts for more than half of their entire headcount.
Interestingly, the yardstick of success for most of this group is based on a relative comparison of individual progress vis-à-vis their friends (or peer group) in the academic institutions or elsewhere. In the absence of any cross-company parity of roles or designations today (a subject that I covered in a separate paper elsewhere), salary and promotions and frequencies thereof have been the key drivers of measuring the success in the industry. It has also driven a group of young talented professionals to choose technologies that support such success criteria more.
Secondly, the trend is also supported by the companies as the industry has, by far, witnessed a reasonably high year on year growth. The companies have supported this trend through higher salary hikes, multiple frequent promotions (often by introducing new designations) and by hiring laterally at much higher salaries than the benchmark of most other industries.
Both these trends have created a social phenomenon in the industry of developing short term mindsets – that are driven by factors like peer status, peer salary, working in the most lucrative technologies etc. So, in a way, the tendency of the people to have a short-term vision is supported by the industry during the high growth. What is striking is that a significant part of this population does not have a long-term view of their careers in IT and do not perceive the roles that they may like to play in the long-run. Is this always a deliberate strategy from these professionals?
First, majority of people in the IT services continue to work on relatively low-end activities like code development, support and testing. Typical outsourcing models have started focusing on high-end architectural design or business analysis from offshore and is a good sign. Moreover, the new edge technology like RPA, AI, ML tend to reduce (in various degrees across functions and industry) the dependency of human intervention in repeatable, rule-based delivery of IT or process in near to medium term. The team therefore, may find a significant challenge in career choice after a decade or two of IT experience.
Secondly, pure technology focus often becomes a show stopper for their growth within the organization in India - owing to lack of business understanding or exposure. Many of them therefore, prefer to move to general management or project management as they potentially have better visibility in the organizations. Thanks to technology automation, AI intervention and bottom-line pressure from lower growth now, there is a decline in the demand for general management profiles in the organizations.
So far high growth of the industry could support the “peer-comparison” culture, many professionals could imagine the career plan as a sprint runner. Many of them at their forties have faced or started facing unwarranted slower growth or stagnation in their career over time. The recent incidences of voluntary and involuntary retirement of middle management professionals even from the large IT companies can be explained partially by the fitment of these employees in the organizations. This is attributable to changing focus of technology or industry and inability of these groups to align to focus of the company (and sometimes to aggressive focus on short-term objectives). It is also important to align individual career (constraint optimization!) to the company we work for or align to the company(ies) that meet our long-term career aspirations. I have deliberately excluded the independent business option as a career option in this write-up.
In summary, the IT industry has started giving the indications of maturity - through lower-than-before salary hike, retrenchment of no-longer-relevant skillsets, tougher competitions from other countries for IT outsourcing jobs, regulatory controls to check outsourcing etc. While the industry will be reacting to this with different delivery models, better pricing models, more high-end outsourcing work, reskilling of workforce to newer technology areas, encouraging statutory/ regulatory controls, higher productivity etc, one of the key factors of success is to set the expectations of the employees to focus on a long term career plan. The difference between a sprinter and a marathon runner is the essence of the IT career today. One needs to pace the career aspirations over a longer period and plan when to run fast and when to go slow and reserve energy (and reskill for next miles). Sooner we do it, we may find enhanced strength of the industry to deal with the challenges and maintain higher arbitrage benefits and possibly over a longer period.
It will bring a sense of stability in the career planning than what my daughter does!
(The view expressed by the author is personal)