Career Visioning

Here at hahvahd, we believe in developing our people and putting them through extremely expensive seeming executive development programs where we can really reach in and understand who we are at our core so we can understand each other better.
In this particular case, it was a multi-step system:

1) we took an exam like MBTI (Career Leader professional report) but more questions and in the end, it told you what you were interested in, what you thought you were strong at and what job seems to be a good fit in terms of interest. You were compared against a huge amount of data (200,000 business professional profile and 400 mba schools).

My results were:
Highs:
Application of Technology - interested in learning about and using new technologies. Enjoy analyzing and designing business processes such as production and operations systems
Creative production - Enjoy brainstorming novel ideas for products and services. Prefer early, creative stages of businesses to later "maintenance" phase

Lows:
Quantitative analysis - prefer solving business issues by "running the numbers." Enjoy building computer models, doing financial and market research analysis
Managing people and relationships - interested working with and through others on a day-to-day basis.

Best career path machines:
Management in Science and Engineering - 99% match
Management of New Product Development - 99% match
Venture Capital - 97% match
...
Investment banking - 9% match

Basically, I told it a bunch of stuff, and it told me back the same bunch of stuff.

2) Visioning exercise
Tim Butler, the founder of CareerLeader tried to hypnotize us by having us close our eyes and repeating the following over and over again: "You are where you want to be 5 years from now. What are you doing? Where are you? Who is around you? What's the office like? Are there plants? Who does this type of thing?"

I imagined... Ally McBeal's office and minions coming up to me to ask me to sign things.
Habits of aligning one's goals with societal images of success die hard...

3) Career Teams
From 9am-3pm on a Saturday, we met with a random group of people we didn't know to talk about what we really wanted to do in life. At the beginning of the day, we were given a list of 100 random jobs and told to instinctively select 12 of them that job out at us. The key was to ignore whether our skills make us best suited to the job but to circle things that just looked interesting. After we selected them, we ranked them and broke into our groups.

Our team was told to say what Themes, Images and Tensions our list of jobs seemed to have without us intervening. After they finished with discussing, our second year MBA helped up to come up with our vision, strategy and tactics to get the job that suits us best.

My main takeaway from this is: I'm a lot more idealist still than I thought.

I've put everything we worked on here:

Expectations

We have a lot of opportunities for career development starting first with a series of personality tests and a "visioning" exercise where the world renowned Tim Butler tries to hypnotize you by saying the same thing over and over again.

"You are where you want to be five years from now. Where are you? What do you see? Who does this job? Who else is there? Are there plants?"

While my personality tests revealed firstly that I'm a dork and secondly that I want unstructured lax work environments ("freeflow of ideas" is an image my career team came up with), during the visioning exercise, I imagined... Ally McBeal. High corporate office. Large windows. Expensive plants. Me in a suit and minion asking for my approval on random documents. Doesn't make sense, or does it? While all these career soul seeking showed me that I know what I want (and am sometimes just too chicken to do it), deep inside me, there's still a desire to conform to societal pressures of what it means to be "successful". This effect was a lot better when I was not in the east coast when the breadth of things people did with their lives seemed to expand... but now that I'm back, it's so easy to fall back into thinking those expectations from others are actually what I want. The corporate office, the money, the prestige, the elite education and the sophisticated tastes and activities. Interestingly, it seemed like every career team but mine also talked about the importance of prestige later in life.

Is this really an east coast thing or is it that I'm not exposed to this in California and abroad because I never fully integrated there?

Quote

"I spoke to my wife and I guess the one thing that puzzles us is we fail to see what job you could get after an MBA from Harvard that you can't get now..."

-Steffen


Yea, I only write to complain. But, at least now I'm meeting cool people... like having coffee with the entrepreneurs who've started companies... on the other hand, half the people here just want to work at Facebook... or zynga...

And... back to kindergarten we go...

Things that people who are not MBA students find atrocious about a bschool education:
1) Students can only leave their seats mid-class for a medical emergency. Bathroom breaks are not allowed and it is recommended that you control your liquid
2) Students don't choose their classes. They sit in a room and the professors come to them.
3) Students don't choose their seats. These are assigned in the beginning of the year and are maintained year round
4) Students don't choose their classmates. You are assigned to a section with 90 people who you will take all your classes with and whom you will adore
5) I found out what classes I was in through a mystery distribution window that had all my books and materials, including case handouts organized by class
6) Sections have competitions in sports, academics, mascots (sometimes in the form of a student who wears the Emu outfit) and good performance in these will get you the Student Association cup, which will live in the section room

You end up loving your section mates and they are why you are in bschool. Although your section is random.

blog use...

wow so I really stopped writing on this the second the essays hit majorly... either that or I was too busy partying. After 3 more months of almost pure essaying and putting some friendships in threat because of that, I turned into "oh my god, I'm moving away soon mode" and started partying and traveling as much as I could.

Things that I need to write about and haven't:

1) The effect of age on (the impression) of how quickly relationships deepen. A seemingly exponential curve
2) At what age do you start going for "successful and nice" vs "fun and exciting". I seem to have gone the opposite direction on this
3) Lifestyles. Partying vs museums vs being dorks. Perceived difference in group of people, how justified they are
4) Stories describing Singapore. About the inflexibility of all service people. The blatant racism.
5) Expectations vs reality. How much expectations formed in childhood actually affect who we are. Difficulties of rebelling
6) People are frequently more alone than we think.


Yea, pretty sure that now that I've listed them, I'll never write about them.