This is a really big deal and can consume a lot of your time as you get closer to the big day.
You now have many years of work experience. You are fully aware that all jobs have pros and cons and in general, if you had aligned your interests well at the time of joining, the pros have a sight edge over the cons, meaning, on balance, life's been good!
One good indicator of whether you are ready to hang up your boots is when your interest and enthusiasm for the job has been waning for SEVERAL years. Usually it happens post a major event in your personal life, like a debilitating injury, death of a parent or even marriage. These are usually inflection points in your life which can result in major changes in your priorities.
What then?
You then need to either reconcile or act! Both are tough. But sitting on the fence for too long will be detremental both to your interests as well as to the interests of the organization you serve, not to mention, your butt! And it may take months of reflection before you can determine what you can do with the rest of your life. More often than not, it will continue to remain hazy until you begin to act and move in that general direction. Usually a short-list of your interests may be a good starting point. Mine looked something like this:
This is fairly straight forward in the beginning!
However, I recommend that instead of my back-of-the-envelope demonstration, you could open a wire-bound A4 sized notebook to keep adding and then developing your ideas.
"Day sheets" are very useful too. What's that? This is nothing but a section in your notebook where you jot down anything of interest on any particular day. It may be something that you read in the newspaper that morning, picked up in a conversation, heard on the news, seen in a movie, overheard in a restaurant or seen in a hoarding while commuting to work. Or maybe even a dream, a vision or flash of inspiration! You may like to add newpaper/magazine clippings of editorials, articles of interests, job descriptions or whatever perked your interest. And once a week, you consolidate it to update your shortlist or timeline.
A section of your notebook could be dedicated to research on industries, jobs or job functions or even to the analysis of specific companies from their websites or physical copies of their annual reports you find lying around in the waiting areas of some offices or maybe at your "avid investor" friends' home. The annual reports, specifically, the section on "management discussion" provides a wealth of information about a company and its plans. By this, not only do you begin to understand the company but also you become acquainted with "management speak", the lingo of the top executives of the company. Along with this, it is useful to study the fiscal policy (Budget) documents published by the Ministry of Finance, news articles of your country's securities and stock exchange regulator and the monetary policy as laid out by the Fed or Reserve Bank.
India has the SEBI (sebi.gov.in), the RBI (rbi.org.in) and Ministry of Finance (finmin.nic.in). All documents pertaining to the Budget 2012 for instance is at the FinMin website indiabudget.nic.in. It is useful to go through both the "Economic Survey" and the "Union Budget" to get a good macroeconomic (read "high level") perspective.
In the US for example, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retreival system (or EDGAR for short) which is an important source for researching public companies. Again, pick up a set of 5-6 companies from among the top fifty in the Fortune 500 list (search google or download the FORTUNE magazine webapp) and use EDGAR to retrieve the latest filings.
Say for example, you want to research GE. Find and click on the company search link in EDGAR and give the company name "General Electric" in the company name box. This will first give you a list of GE group companies. Locate the "General Electric Co" from the list and click on the CIK (Central Index Key) in column one. This leads to all the documents filed by GE. Pick out the 10-K (annual report) filing and click on the "Documents" button provided against it.Then click on the first document in the list that appears - the "10K form".
The second page of the 10-K has the table of contents. Your primary area of interest is Item 7 in Part II, that is "Management Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation". Click on the link and read through the entire section. If you dont know the company, it is useful to start with Item 1 (Business) and Item 1A (Risk Factors). Item 11 (Executive Compensation) might be revealing in its own right!
I can assure you that no B-school can provide this kind of education. This is the real stuff for grown-ups, not the b-school mechanics - the theoretical stuff taught to the 20-something just-out-of-college kids with raging hormones and unquenchable thirst who appear to inhabit those campuses!
Will you understand all of the terminology used in these documents?
No chance!
At least, not initially. So read this in conjunction with common web-based investor encyclopedias like Investopedia (investopedia.com) or even generic ones like Wikipedia. Begin to take these first baby steps and very soon, you will find yourself getting comfortable with the language.
Much later, when you apply for jobs or are interviewing for one, the conversation will be very much along the lines of these management discussions. Interviews at your level is not meant to test your knowledge. That mode is for freshly coined graduate trainees. You will have done your homework, researched the company you are interviewing with well enough to understand where the challenges lie.
And if the person you are interacting with, can take away something of immediate value for the organization for the time he (or she) invests in the conversation with you, you have your foot in the door. If you cannot do this, don't waste their time. Or yours, for that matter! It will only mean that your re-education is not complete yet.
Coming back to our current topic, you now have your SHORTLIST! You have been researching and developing each item in your shortlist. It may take weeks or even months, but a picture will begin to emerge. And during this while, the more the number of people you meet and interact with (and I mean, outside the services), and with an open, inquiring mind (this is tougher than you can imagine!), the more developed your plan, timeline and options become.
You now have many years of work experience. You are fully aware that all jobs have pros and cons and in general, if you had aligned your interests well at the time of joining, the pros have a sight edge over the cons, meaning, on balance, life's been good!
One good indicator of whether you are ready to hang up your boots is when your interest and enthusiasm for the job has been waning for SEVERAL years. Usually it happens post a major event in your personal life, like a debilitating injury, death of a parent or even marriage. These are usually inflection points in your life which can result in major changes in your priorities.
What then?
You then need to either reconcile or act! Both are tough. But sitting on the fence for too long will be detremental both to your interests as well as to the interests of the organization you serve, not to mention, your butt! And it may take months of reflection before you can determine what you can do with the rest of your life. More often than not, it will continue to remain hazy until you begin to act and move in that general direction. Usually a short-list of your interests may be a good starting point. Mine looked something like this:
This is fairly straight forward in the beginning!
However, I recommend that instead of my back-of-the-envelope demonstration, you could open a wire-bound A4 sized notebook to keep adding and then developing your ideas.
"Day sheets" are very useful too. What's that? This is nothing but a section in your notebook where you jot down anything of interest on any particular day. It may be something that you read in the newspaper that morning, picked up in a conversation, heard on the news, seen in a movie, overheard in a restaurant or seen in a hoarding while commuting to work. Or maybe even a dream, a vision or flash of inspiration! You may like to add newpaper/magazine clippings of editorials, articles of interests, job descriptions or whatever perked your interest. And once a week, you consolidate it to update your shortlist or timeline.
A section of your notebook could be dedicated to research on industries, jobs or job functions or even to the analysis of specific companies from their websites or physical copies of their annual reports you find lying around in the waiting areas of some offices or maybe at your "avid investor" friends' home. The annual reports, specifically, the section on "management discussion" provides a wealth of information about a company and its plans. By this, not only do you begin to understand the company but also you become acquainted with "management speak", the lingo of the top executives of the company. Along with this, it is useful to study the fiscal policy (Budget) documents published by the Ministry of Finance, news articles of your country's securities and stock exchange regulator and the monetary policy as laid out by the Fed or Reserve Bank.
India has the SEBI (sebi.gov.in), the RBI (rbi.org.in) and Ministry of Finance (finmin.nic.in). All documents pertaining to the Budget 2012 for instance is at the FinMin website indiabudget.nic.in. It is useful to go through both the "Economic Survey" and the "Union Budget" to get a good macroeconomic (read "high level") perspective.
In the US for example, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retreival system (or EDGAR for short) which is an important source for researching public companies. Again, pick up a set of 5-6 companies from among the top fifty in the Fortune 500 list (search google or download the FORTUNE magazine webapp) and use EDGAR to retrieve the latest filings.
Say for example, you want to research GE. Find and click on the company search link in EDGAR and give the company name "General Electric" in the company name box. This will first give you a list of GE group companies. Locate the "General Electric Co" from the list and click on the CIK (Central Index Key) in column one. This leads to all the documents filed by GE. Pick out the 10-K (annual report) filing and click on the "Documents" button provided against it.Then click on the first document in the list that appears - the "10K form".
The second page of the 10-K has the table of contents. Your primary area of interest is Item 7 in Part II, that is "Management Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation". Click on the link and read through the entire section. If you dont know the company, it is useful to start with Item 1 (Business) and Item 1A (Risk Factors). Item 11 (Executive Compensation) might be revealing in its own right!
I can assure you that no B-school can provide this kind of education. This is the real stuff for grown-ups, not the b-school mechanics - the theoretical stuff taught to the 20-something just-out-of-college kids with raging hormones and unquenchable thirst who appear to inhabit those campuses!
Will you understand all of the terminology used in these documents?
No chance!
At least, not initially. So read this in conjunction with common web-based investor encyclopedias like Investopedia (investopedia.com) or even generic ones like Wikipedia. Begin to take these first baby steps and very soon, you will find yourself getting comfortable with the language.
Much later, when you apply for jobs or are interviewing for one, the conversation will be very much along the lines of these management discussions. Interviews at your level is not meant to test your knowledge. That mode is for freshly coined graduate trainees. You will have done your homework, researched the company you are interviewing with well enough to understand where the challenges lie.
And if the person you are interacting with, can take away something of immediate value for the organization for the time he (or she) invests in the conversation with you, you have your foot in the door. If you cannot do this, don't waste their time. Or yours, for that matter! It will only mean that your re-education is not complete yet.
Coming back to our current topic, you now have your SHORTLIST! You have been researching and developing each item in your shortlist. It may take weeks or even months, but a picture will begin to emerge. And during this while, the more the number of people you meet and interact with (and I mean, outside the services), and with an open, inquiring mind (this is tougher than you can imagine!), the more developed your plan, timeline and options become.
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