Career planning – a journey from ‘having Potential’ to ‘building capability’.

How many times have we gone to our drawing board to plan for a successful career? When you sit for the same next time, just try out few of the below tips.


Career planning is a conglomeration of many carefully planned short successful journeys where each journey starts from the person’s ‘have potential’ stage to ‘have capability’. Let us see how we can decipher this thought.

Many times we fail to interpret the word potential. If someone says you have a good potential, it simply means that you are on the right path, but you are not quite there. Many times we become complacent at that stage and forget to take it further and build the capability.

To start with, it is important for us to know what potential we have. For example, if someone says, you have the potential to become a good manager, it doesn’t mean that you are a good manager. It just means that you have the qualities to become a manager. While that person’s job ends where he has commented it, your job has just begun. You now need to nourish the potential and gain the maturity to handle a managerial position.

This means, simply having potential will not help but you need to work towards building capability in you. Until then you are a trainee. It is as good as telling that a person, only with his imagination capabilities will not become an architect; he has to build the capability by learning the techniques through a well-designed architecture course.

You should never try to venture in to an area where you do not have the potential. For that identifying your areas of potential is very important. The human race is created with such diverse nature that everyone has got a specific role to play. The key is to identify what role you need to play in your career.

If you end up doing a job which is not as per your aptitude, your work life will be nothing short of a disaster. This is true how much ever good position you are holding. Similarly if you do a job in which you can add value, you will enjoy every bit of your professional life. This is true whatever may be the grade of work you are doing.

Now let’s see how to build the capability. Experience with right expertise is what defines one’s capability. The journey from potential to capability is all about nourishing your potential in line with expected end result; i.e. “having capability by way of building expertise through adequate experience”.

Here the only variable is the level of experience that one can get. The experience varies with 2 factors
1. Availability of opportunity
2. Your alertness to grab the opportunity.

The good thing is that if you are alert, opportunities will hit your door. Or in other words, we fail to recognize the opportunities which are hitting our door, simple because we are not alert. So opportunity is not a factor of luck alone, it is also a factor of our alertness and acceptance.

In short, if you are smart, you will make use of the available opportunity efficiently and prove that success is all about attaining the goal by;
1. Identifying your potential and all available opportunities
2. Perseverance & focus to use the opportunity and nourish the potential
3. Building the capability through right experience, exposure and expertise

So be alert!; opportunity is already in our door steps. Your short journeys from potentials to capabilities start now!