Managing Career

Are we, Chartered Accountants managing our career??? Is our growth dependent on growth of our clients business?? If the answer is Yes, we are being managed by our clients and their growth. Career is like a business and is to be planned and properly managed. This is applicable to both Chartered Accountants in service and in practice. In fact career management is applicable to each and every individuals.

New economy is emerging and importance of knowledge workers gaining recognition. We Chartered Accountants are knowledge workers. Our intellectual capital is our specialized finance & taxation knowledge, our skills and continues learning capacity. So in Today's economy we individuals must control our destinies and not companies we work for or our clients.

"No matter where you work, you are not an employee. You are in business with one employer, yourself, in competition with millions of similar businesses world wide. Nobody owes you a career. You own it as a sole proprietor" says Andy Groove, Chairman of Intel. Employers are not offering jobs for life now. Time has changed and one has to take charge of his/her career. You have to develop and deploy your intellectual capital where it is most beneficial to you. Certainly this does not mean changing company or area of operations continuously. It can be but it may not be necessary.

Factors influencing our Human Capital:

In addition to our intellectual capital, there are factors affecting our careers. Not only careers but also our personal life is also affected by these factors. Our emotional balance/capital and social capital/contacts plays important role in our personal & professional life. Each of these factors is interrelated and influences our overall growth. Learning a continues process: Ways of doing business is changing and we being business and tax consultants have to look beyond obvious tomorrow. Our traditional areas of practice will become extinct sooner.

We have online finance and investment guidance available free of cost. We have online tax forms, which can be filled and submitted directly online to Income Tax Department. Audits can be conducted online and without much wastage of time on routine checking. We have Internet sites providing templates for preparation of project reports. This is just a beginning, but days are not far that these technologies will redefine our role as finance and tax consultants.

Learning new and emerging things, acquiring knowledge of new ways of doing business is critical for our survival professionally. To quote Chairman of GE Mr. Jack Welch , "the essence of boundryless ,learning organization is that everyday people are the dumbest they can be" There are always someone who is doing something better than us. Crux of the matter is learn learn and learn. Everyday offers us great learning opportunities. Make it a point to learn one new thing daily. Instead of evaluating and offering judgement on matters, start learning many things and be open. Tom Peter has in his book The circle of Innovation rightly said, " It is not difficult to learn new things, what is difficult is to forget what we know". As an auditor we tend to look everything with suspicion. We advice our clients so we are always above them and we know better than everybody else. This tendency makes us blind to receive new things & learn new things. Our existing knowledge can be utilize to acquire new knowledge of our interest. Some time we have to completely unlearn what we have learnt to learn new things.

Need Courage:

Changing existing career or learning new things need courage. It is not easy. General human tendency is to resist change. We are comfortable where we are. But everyone knows, to remain where we are, in this knowledge economy we have to run and run faster. We have to reinvest ourselves. Managing careers means love what u do and get best return out of it. If you do not love what you do, you are suffering, even if you are making money. Remember every new thing begin with crisis. So unless you feel crisis in your existing career you are unlikely to change. Feeling of crisis compels you to reinvent yourself.

Once you feel necessity to change, think of your strength and weakness. What else you can do with existing strength? How can you remove your weakness or roadblocks in your success in new area of working?? What new knowledge is necessary for me?? How can I acquire that knowledge?? Answer all these questions and you have taken the first step to change your career /life.

Certainly to achieve something in life one has to sacrifice many things very dear to oneself. This is true for any thing you do or want to achieve. But you have to choose and make decisions about what you want to keep and what you want to leave. Professionals like us has distinct advantage of fast learning capacity (if we wish to) . Every year we learn many new things, our bureaucrats to be given salute for the same. Continues changes in tax and other statues and assimilation /application of the same has made us flexible.

Continues learning is our core competence. Now with this hidden core competence offers us cutting advantage in this new economy. This can be easily proved if we look at leading big five CA firms all over the world, they have become the change agent for companies around the world in new emerging knowledge economy. Visit their Websites to know what they are doing. Charting future trend should not be difficult if we analyses their activities. We will know from where future growth will come.

Bit on mind blocks:

Many a times we feel certain things are not possible or how will I be able to change?? Remember one thing you must stop imagining all the reasons why something can't be done and start thinking about ways you can make is work or get it done. Think of some events or things that is impossible but if happens can change your career drastically. Then try to achieve that change and you will certainly amazed at the results of your attempt. Consistently challenge the obvious ways of doing things. New ways will emerge 100%. Purpose to quote above example is to make one feel that one can always become successful in new a career. Remove all mind blocks. Realise need to change and take first step. If I quote Robert Kennedy, " Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly". Infosys Technologies, grand success story of recent times has used the above quote in its Annual Report 1999-2000 as an opening statement.

Conclusion:

I feel no one should doubt the necessity to change. New economy is emerging and we are lucky to witness such a drastic change in front of us. Every thing around us is changing. India is emerging stronger in the new economy. World is paying attention to our knowledge base and our information technology initiatives. Entrepreneurship is blossoming all around. If everything is changing needless to say, How can we Chartered Accountants remain where we are??? How can we keep doing what we used to do in the old economy and still succeed?? The only answer is change. Many of us realized necessity to change when we attended Business Consultancy Study course at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute last year. Change is a continues process and there is no other option!!!

Let's reinvest ourselves. Have enough courage do what we want to do and not what others want us to do. Tell the world that we are changing. If we wont tell people about our change it will take years for them to know. Constantly remind us "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly".