Career Paths

If you want to be successful on the job the most important job is to find out everything there is about you: what you want, what you can best and what makes you happy.

In general there are 2 main directions one could take. The one of a generalist and the one of a specialist.

The generalist is an all-rounder that has an overview of all the company's processes and knows a bit of everything. Normally these are the ones that later one take the leadership positions as they require strategic thinking that connects a lot of dots and making suggestions regarding the future course. Therefore also advisory services can be a possible working field. 

On the other the specialist is just perfecting on one field. They are trying to get all the details related to that and broadening their horizon with the newest techniques, software, legal changes, etc. Important is that they can channel this information into overviews or presentations for the generalists, so that they may base their decisions upon it. If specialists wants to get a leadership position they have to get rid of trying to get to many details or try to understand the day-to-day business.

But in real life unfortunately it is more difficult to find out as there are a lot of shades in between. For example: A controller needs to be a specialist of mathematical methods, data banks, etc. But they also need to have a general idea of all the other company's compartments as they analyse the whole companies and prepare strategic advise to them. But the emphasis is on the specialist knowledge and the other information has just supportive character. Well, that's the way I see it.

Most important is to start these thoughts, because lots of people start the other way around by asking: How can I get 100k salary, how can I get a leadership position, how can I get a job in company ABC, ...? 

You should ask yourself if you will be happy at your destination before starting the journey.

Jeff Fennell - "Silver Falls Trail"; Some rights reserved. Quelle: www.piqs.de