A couple of days back I was talking to a friend of mine about career development plans. We work for the same organization and this is the time of the year when we sit with our manager and discuss our goals and development plans for the year. We got around to discussing the question that I know many managers ask their reports when the discussion comes to career development - "So what do you want to do? What do you want to do three/five years from now?" In my opinion, this is a stupid question, because apart from a few extremely directed people, most people do not have a clear idea of what they want to do/be five years later. I felt that we should avoid giving an answer like "I want to be a manager/VP/tech lead/CEO " and try to explain the concept of individual job satisfaction, which surprisingly, does not seem be well understood these days.

An honest answer would split the question into two parts - the first part involves intellectual satisfaction, the second involves emotional satisfaction. Intellectual satisfaction can come when the work we are doing is not mind numbingly boring and allows us to use our brains to solve problems - it can be in sales/marketing, technical or even accounting (yes, I have been told that there are interesting problems even in the world of bean counters!). It can also come from expanding your area of expertise,by having more responsibilities (and therefore handling more problems). The second part is a little trickier, but in general emotional satisfaction (to the extent possible in the corporate world) can come when you see that your career has progressed satisfactorily and more importantly, there is scope of further advancement. It also comes when you are recognized by your peers and your supervisors and when you are well compensated for your efforts.

My friend commented that I won't go anywhere if I tried this line during my career development discussion because most managers he has met wants a laundry list of tasks/goals and is not interested in listening to philosophical discussions. Although my experience is similar, I am sure that the really good managers will be interested in hearing out this line of though because they care for their team members, whereas those who have reached their level of incompetency will give it the short shift. The lack of good managers is why the world is in such a mess!