#294 Six Skills Data Professionals Need To Succeed with Abhijit Bhaduri, Brand Evangelist & Former General Manager of Global L&D at Microsoft

Hi, I'm Maggie, VP of Curriculum at datacamp, and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be to keep up with the rapid changes in data and AI. But staying ahead doesn't have to be hard. That's why our curriculum team has curated the best learning content to help you and your team stay ahead, covering everything from data and AI literacy for busy executives to cutting edge generative AI for developers, and everything in between. Whether you're upskilling yourself or your team, we make learning practical, engaging and flexible. It just works. Power your data and AI transformation journey on datacamp.com youm can either choose to do specialization in different aspects of data, or you can choose the kind of field that you can work in, whether it's healthcare or analytics or retail. Or you can then choose whether you want to work solo and become a contractor, or do you want to get employed? Do you want to do part time? Do you want to go into an office? Do you like to work remote? Each option that you create creates a set of possibilities. The third element that introduces fluidity is the half life of a skill that used to be much longer. Today it is down to about two and a half three years in technology. Some of the technology fields are emerging even faster. Sometimes the best pairs of skills are things that go together because it's the polar opposite. So people who are great in storytelling can learn about data, understand the nuances of data, or people who are great in, let's say analyt can figure out how to convey it in a manner which the business people can understand.

Welcome to Data Framed. This is Richie. In the last decade or two, the traditional career idea of learning the skills to succeed in a particular industry or domain and then sailing through to retirement. It's taken a big hit. The half life in skills grows ever shorter and job security is decreasing in many fields. The 2000 and tens saw the rise of side hustles and now we see AI disrupting careers all over again. It's time for another dose of career advice. Today we're exploring the ways to succeed in a world of fluid careers. Our guest has compiled a list of six core skills that will help your career aspirations without wanting to spoil too much. Some of the skills, like being able to continually upskill yourself, should be familiar to regular date friend listeners, but some are brand new, so listen on to find out what they are. Our guest is a learning and development legend. Abhijit Bhadori runs a consultancy advising organizations on talent and leadership development and previously he was partner and General manager for Global Learning and development at Microsoft, where he led the tech giant's onboarding and upskilling strategy. The San Francisco examiner has described him as the world's foremost expert on talent and development, and he's among the 10 most sought after brand evangelists. Abhijit also teaches in the doctoral program for Chief Learning Officers at the University of Pennsylvania, and his latest book is called Career 3.0, which forms the basis of our conversation today. Let's find out about those six skills. Hi Abhijit, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here, Rishi.

So just to get started, I'm curious, do you think that having a career is getting easier or harder?

I think it's a little bit like when you have two flavors of ice cream to choose from, chocolate or vanilla, it becomes easy. But if you go to a shop which says, we've got 70 versions of ice cream and 20 toppings that you can add and subtract, it becomes infinitely harder to choose. And that's what's happening. You think about data professionals. You can either choose to do specialization in different aspects of data, or you can choose the kind of field that you can work in, whether it's healthcare or analytics or retail. Or you can then choose whether you want to work solo and become a contractor or do you want to get employed? Do you want to do part time? Do you want to go into an office? Do you like to work remote? Each option that you create creates a set of possibilities and takes away a set of possibilities. You always are wondering, did I gain more? Did I lose more? And so that's why navigating your career becomes that much harder. Really?

That's interesting. So on the one hand, there are many different possible ways to do a career. Now you can probably find something that fits you, but the hard part is working out what's going to fit you and choosing the right thing. Okay, so I guess, do you have any advice then for getting over this paralysis for not knowing what to do with your career?

No, it doesn't matter. Whatever you do today is probably going to need to be reinvented. So it doesn't matter. Experiment and try it out. That's my view. I always keep experimenting with stuff that I like to do. So, you know, that's what I would tell anyone.

I like the idea of experimenting and just keep trying stuff. I think that's very relevant for people in the data world. You do data experiments, so you can also experiment with your own career. And I do like the idea that we've both had a Few years of career experience, but you're still trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up and try new things.

And that's true for everyone. Actually, I think this is a question. What do I want to be when I grow up? It's probably even more relevant today because we are all living longer. So you have enough time to grow up.

That's actually kind of fascinating. So people are living longer. Does that change your career strategy?

Oh yes, of course. Because a, you need to think about if you have a 60 year lifespan versus 80 year lifespan versus a 100 year lifespan, the amount of money you need to live is different. And because cost of living goes up, inflation, et cetera, all of that. But more than that, the way that you stay relevant also keeps changing. And in today's world, that changes even more rapidly than it used to before. So you have to keep reinventing yourself, try out different things, work in different kinds of settings. So it's sort of at some stage becomes very exciting. So I think it's a good time to be alive.

That's very reassuring. I like that. I totally agree with you. It is a good time to be alive. There's lots of cool stuff going on. But yeah, interesting that the fact that you're living longer means that you are going to have to reinvent yourself at some point. Now I'd like to talk a bit about your latest book. So career 3.0. And in this you've got three different categorizations for types of career. So can you talk me through what the 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 careers are?

1.0 career is typically the traditional one which people used to have. So let's say somebody joined the steel company, they joined there and retired from there. You joined the mining company, you joined there and retired from there. Career 2.0 is really when people create a side gig which is very different from the main career that they have. So you might be a data scientist, but you actually have a side gig. Maybe a cookery show is a completely different thing that you monetize. And Career three auto, think about it like a pizza where you have different skills are the slices of pizza and you can combine different aspects and then start to create career opportunities through different combinations. That's the career 3.0 model which I talk about in this book.

Okay, so rather than just having a single career, you've got lots of kind of, I guess, fragments of career that somehow sort of blend together into one whole thing. Is that about right?

You are combining different skills. So, for example, I'm in talent management, which is the core skill that I studied and had a degree in. But I also like to draw, which is what I do independently as well. I do illustrate articles and different kinds of poems and books, which I do professionally, but I also use them in my own work. So when I do my talks or when I do my keynotes, I use my cartoons and drawings in my slides. So I combine the two of them in a completely different space, which is keynotes. But I'm bringing two different skills along, talent management and the drawing. So that's the way to think about career strategies for career 3.0.

Okay, that's very cool. I guess in my own case, it's like I can do data science, but also have conversations somehow that combines you are doing it. Data podcast.

Yeah, wonderful.

All right, excellent. So we'll talk about career 3.0 in a moment, but maybe we'll start with like the 1.0 career, since I think that's what most people are familiar with. So this is the idea that you've got a single area of expertise that you hone throughout your career lifetime. Is this still a viable option?

Oh, yes, absolutely. For practically every profession, there is a segment which is really a 1.0 option. So for example, if you are a plumber, you can be a plumber and continue doing that for the rest of your life. You were a data scientist, you could continue doing most of it for the rest of your life. But technology keeps changing. So that's one variable that you are adding to the mix. And then of course, the place where you decide to use the expertise that keeps changing. So you can use it in healthcare, you can use it in retail, you can use it in sports. So different kinds of options keep emerging. And then you decide that you want to do it as an employee or as a freelancer or a part time consultant. Do you want to work globally? Do you want to do some part of it globally and some part of it locally? Do you like commuting? Do you like traveling? So all those variables, which are personal variables, all of them come together. But if you want to keep it simple, yes, it's possible to start working in a company which is, you know, a large company, which manufacturers or which works with data analytics people and build your career around that. So it could be just one of the ways in which you can manage your career. So absolutely a viable thing.

That's good to know that this is still possible. Do you have any tips on like, how you might succeed in a 1.0 type career, like, how do you do these things better?

So I think being able to succeed in any one of these areas requires a certain set of skills. For example, you can be a data scientist and you can teach people in your organization how to use data better. Or potentially those are some of the ways in which you can help your business development team to sell the idea of what you do and become a storyteller. And that becomes another way in which you can continue to work at the same company, but you kind of find different ways of other people benefiting from the skill that you have. So that's the easiest way to stay relevant as well as stay in the same career. So career 1.0 is very much a viable, visible.

And it sounds like in this case, like one of the benefits of this 1.0 career is that you've got this sort of stability, like there's a certain amount of consistency around the job. So is that the sort of reason you'd go into a 1.0 type career, or are there other reasons you might want to pick that type?

You know, you have to think about the work that you do in two kinds of ways. One is, do you like to dig deep and really discover the depths of the feet? That's one kind of a style that you really dig deep and say, I'm going to dig deep and be a data specialist. And you kind of really stay true to that. So you know more about your field than anybody else. So you understand whether, let's say you use it for. You're a TensorFlow specialist. Okay, so then you kind of look at that, but you also begin to understand that this technology keeps changing. So the necessary part of technology is going to evolve. So like Julia is now coming up as another new way of shaping the way data gets looked at. So then that's another way that you can do that. You can stay a specialist but keep changing the technology. So that's still the same way of doing that. So your business model can keep evolving, but the skill that you bring to the table is really staying the same. So, yes, very doable.

So you've got a sort of consistency in terms of like the type of work you're doing, but probably the underlying technology is going to change. So let's talk a bit about the 2.0 careers. This is the idea of having a side hustle. Do you want to talk me through? Why do you need to bother with this second job?

I think one of the ways to think about it is a side hustle. Can be a very powerful way for you to start learning something new. So that's the first big thing. 34% of Americans actually have a side hustle of different kinds of. And when I say a side hustle, what I really mean is it could be a side hustle in a related area. So, for example, you could be a specialist in Python, but you are beginning to teach another kind of language, or you are creating videos on a very different kind of a field. It could be sports, it could be how to use data science and sports and become better player. That could be your second side asset. Related, but in a different ecosystem. The other piece could be that you have a sort of a, almost a polar opposite skill. So you are a data scientist, but you are a great storyteller. So you can combine the two of them. I mean, you are a good example of that. You are a data scientist, but you are also using that to build awareness about data science. And you are an evangelist for the organization and all of that. You are doing something creative in this new field called media, and you're creating a podcast. So all of these are different ways in which your career 2.0 model can work out. Even though you're employed in the same place, you can still have a career 2.0 model. You don't have to be employed in one place and do something that's an option, but you could still be employed in the same company and do two things for the company. Employers, by and large, love it.

Okay, yeah, I can certainly see how the difference where it's like, okay, I'm poor, I need a second job driving Uber just to sort of pay the rent, and I'm doing two different things within my company and it gives me a bit of flexibility and more excitement in the day job, I suppose. So it seems like quite a few of these sort of secondary jobs, they are sort of related to media ideas or creating content in some sort of way. Is that where you should start looking if you want to have a 2.0 career or other areas you recommend?

A career is basically built on one single premise, which is whatever you are doing is of value to somebody else, so you're creating value for somebody else. Whether It's a career 1.0 model or career 2.0 model or a career 3.0 model, that remains constant. So a scientist creates value for the organization or the field of research, whichever way you think about it. So that's a given. In career 2.0 model, what you're really doing is you could be creating value for Two different kinds of audience groups. You know, one could be the customer, which you're doing, let's say, with your employment. And two can be the value that you create for your colleagues inside the organization. That's another way of doing it. Or you could be creating value for, let's say, an audience outside the organization. That's another way of looking at the careers. So these are all different ways in which you can work.

That's brilliant. I like that there is that sort of flexibility of different ways of doing these things. So just one more. On the 2.0 style careers, you've given some examples of good secondary areas for people who are data professionals. You mentioned the idea of data storytelling, like communication side. You mentioned the idea of podcasting, things like that. Are there any other sort of secondary areas you think go alongside data careers?

Yeah. So maybe in one part of your work could be about cleaning up data which you receive. Because that's one of the biggest problems that data scientists talk about all the time. That when they're trying to bring in data into a new language or a different model, then the biggest problem is how do you make one piece of data talk to that particular framework? Because this data has been built in different formats, different conventions. People are never consistent. So a very large part of it goes in cleaning that up. So that could be one part of what you do. The other could be teaching somebody. And that teaching can be in your field. It can be teaching a very different field. It can be inside the organization, it can be outside the organization. So there are multiple ways on which you can start creating this option. What you talked about when people are driving an Uber outside of the workhouse, that's another example of career 2.0. But it's where the work that you are doing is outside of your main employment. But it doesn't have to be. It can be within the same company as well.

So that's interesting. Like the data cleaning example you gave. I suppose in a way that's a sort of combination of being a data analyst and a data engineer. And those two things combined, they form this sort of new career, which is like analytics engineer. And then I suppose you can go in the other direction. You can have data analyst plus some marketing person become a marketing analyst or maybe some other area of like the commercial side of the business. You have like data and analytics plus sales. You become a sales analyst and there are these sort of hybrid roles there where you're doing two set of things.

You could also start teaching yourself about the ethics of data and you can become a specialist in that. You can teach yourself different things, read up about different kinds of legislation, look at the kind of challenges that people are experiencing, and create value for those solving those kind of problems. Each time you solve a problem, you are creating an opportunity for yourself.

I like the idea. Solve problems and create opportunities. That seems like good career advice. Okay, let's move on from 2.0 careers to 3.0 careers. So you mentioned this is about combining different skills together. Why might you want or need such a sort of fluid career style?

So, you know, careers are also determined not just by the opportunities outside, which, as we said, it could be the kind of skills that you have and the kind of places where you can solve those problems. So it could be the domain could be oil and gas, it could be energy sector, it could be health, it could be marketing. So that's one way of looking at it. The other is whether you are doing, let's say, machine learning or whether you are specializing in Python or TensorFlow or Julia or any of these. But the other way to think about it is your own personal style, your ability to take risks, your ability to live with ambiguity, your ability to see patterns in fields outside of your own specialization. So the kind of person that you are opens up this third set of possibilities. And the more curious you are, the more comfort you have with ambiguity, the more ability you have to create opportunities in different fields and find applications of your skills for solving different kinds of problems that actually creates a multiple set of opportunities. So career 3.0 is really built around a portfolio of skills, a portfolio of domains and sectors where you can solve problems. And it's of course driven by the kind of person you are. So combine these three, you're opening up a very different set of opportunities.

Yeah, it's very cool, the idea that you just keep learning new skills and somehow they form together to have like a. This is who you are and what you can do, and then your career sort of gets matched up to that. So I'd love to get into this idea of a portfolio of skills sort of later on. But before we get to that, at the start we talked about how people have got longer lifespans. They can have a longer career now. Like, it can easily be well over 40 years, maybe 50 years in some cases. This means you need to reinvent yourself several times. Do you have any advice on how you can go about reinventing yourself just.

In terms of the context? What happens is when the lifespans were much shorter and the industries also survived long, so you could Join a company and really expect to retire from there. There was this whole concept of retirement. I think progressively when you start thinking about our lifespan increasing because of better medication, people are more aware of exercise, the kind of food that they have. They're wearing all these wearables, which is telling them how many steps you've taken. All of these things combined together. People are actually living much longer because of a combination of these factors. The second thing that's happening, which is when you look at the lifespan of organizations, that has dropped dramatically from in the 30s. In 1930, the lifespan of an organization was well upward of 70 years. The average Standard Poor 500 company lived for that long. Today, if you look at the standard and poor index and longevity of companies, it's barely in the late teens. So when you think about that, let's say you'd start working theoretically at 25 and you are going to work till, say, 70. Let's just take a very definitive example of that. And if you're going to live to be 100, you probably have to work longer than that. But your employers are going to rapidly go out of business because so many organizations have, and we keep seeing this, that this company declared bankruptcy, this one has got bought up and this one is merged and now is a different entity. And so that fluidity gets introduced by your employer. The third element that introduces fluidity is the half life of a skill that used to be much longer. Today it is down to about two and a half, three years. In technology, some of the technology fields are emerging even faster. So if you look at the models that AI is creating today, those models have been changing really rapidly from the time that we first heard about ChatGPT to today. Think of the number of iterations, the number of models that have come up, the number of applications, everything. The possibilities have gone up dramatically. So all these things together mean the number of skills that you need to build, the things that you need to train yourself. And even as you are doing your day job, that has gone up. So the way of navigating your career has gone up completely different direction. So you no longer can say, learn, earn and retire. Whatever you learn, once you get a job, that's it. Now you're set for life. You can retire. So a second job or a second gig career 2.0 is a good bridge. You try learning something new and you built your expertise almost in a stealth mode. And once you have a certain degree of expertise and you can solve somebody's problem with that, you are ready to bring it into your portfolio and start using that to create opportunities for yourself. So the way to manage your career is completely different.

This is really interesting that your skills are going out to date. Your employers might, might go under or change their strategy, actually, I mean, Talking about like 45th year career, it's really rare for people to stay at an organization for 10 years, let alone 40. So, yeah, I can certainly see how you're going to have to change your employer several times during your career. So you're probably going to have to change your skills as well. And you do need to reinvent yourself on that. I'm curious as to whether when you're reinventing yourself, this needs to be done mindfully, like you need to have a plan for how it's gonna happen or whether you wait and say, okay, well, my job is changing, I'll just go with the flow. What's your strategy here?

The first thing I would say is there's a saying, if you don't know where you are going, you can never get lost. So think about that as the bright side of just going along. So there are people who are comfortable with a lot of ambiguity, so in which case they'll take life as it comes. There are portions when no opportunities come up and they are fine with that. And there is a flood versus famine kind of a situation. Sometimes there's lots of opportunities, sometimes fewer. But if you are a little more mindful, if you look at the corner and sort of see what's happening in the industry, you are aware of what's happening to your field, you're also in tune with the kind of things that people are looking for, the kind of problems. The moment you think you see a problem, that's a career opportunity. So if you think the skill that you have can solve that problem, that is a career opportunity. So the way to think about that would be, all right, so you can sort of go with the flow, but if you are aware of the kind of problems that people are facing, those are all potential areas where you can find options. Whether it's in the same field of data science, that's one model. Or you can solve a problem in a slightly related field, as we said, data science plus storytelling, you are a great person with storytelling. You can build that as a second option, or you can do a portfolio of many different things. So you can be a data scientist working on a particular problem, let's say in the healthcare sector or in a marketing company, and you can be doing the data cleanup for one of the clients as a special project that you are helping somebody out with. Or you could have a third element which could be podcasting and teaching people about data science. That could be a third thing. You could be a writer for a magazine which is read by data science professionals. You could write in a general purpose magazine which is a place where you can demystify what data science is all about and invite more and more students to that field. I mean, I could just go on and on and so there are multiple ways in which you can manage your career. Some like to just be fluid about the options, some don't like so many options. Because reality is that the more options you have, the harder it is to choose, the fewer options you have. It's constraining, but it's easier to choose.

So a lot of this sounds like how you approach this is really going to be based on your personality then. So if you're a planner, you like control, you're probably, probably going to do that in your career. No matter what anyone tells you. If you're a bit more go with the flow, then that's also a viable option. So one of the big themes in your book is that there are six really important skills for anyone to help advance their career. So can you talk me through what are these six essential skills?

You know, these skills are the ones which are useful for people no matter where they are. So one skill is how do you learn something which is something you've not been formally taught before? That's your first skill. The second skill is once you know it, are you able to teach somebody else whatever you've learned? The third skill is how do you become a great storyteller? Because that's one of the best ways to teach people is to tell it through a story, simplify it. The fourth skill is how do you build a strong personal brand so that people look up to you for your expertise? So to me, that's the foundation of a strong personal brand. The fifth is how do you navigate multiple ecosystems, so different kinds of places which don't have anything in common. How well do you navigate those? And the sixth is how do you take your skills and your ideas and everything and manage a portfolio of skills and opportunities as a long term strategy? So these are the six skills you need.

Your first one was about quickly building expertise in a given area. So how do you go about doing this? What tips do you have?

Think of different ways in which you can learn. I mean, some people learn in a very structured way. That's not what I'm referring to. You create your own structures so you learn from the online conversations. What are people talking about, the kind of problems that they are trying to solve for. Who are the experts? Can you name the top three experts of the field? And today, the good thing that has happened is knowledge and learning have become so democratized that no matter which field you're talking about, you have the best of people actually available online through videos. They're talking about their work, they're talking about their books, they're talking about their podcasts. And all of that creates opportunities for you to learn. And there are communities where people are teaching each other different things that they're working on. There are people who are giving you projects that you can actually use to learn and and solve their problems. So all kinds of options exist. Choose the one which works best for you. As you discover your own style of learning, you begin to become really good at it. But I think one of the smartest ways to think about it is as you're learning something, figure out how would I simplify this and teach somebody exactly what I learned today? In the last half an hour, I've learned something. How do I teach somebody using a completely different set of examples other than what I was told. So that is a great way in which you can continuously learn new things. Because your mind is a lot more alert when you know you've got to teach somebody else about that. Absolutely. Yeah.

I definitely agree that having to teach someone somewhere else, you really do need to know your stuff intimately. Okay, so before you were talking about how the half life of skills is decreasing. Like many skills just go out of date a lot faster. How do you deal with this? How do you keep up with the sort of ever shortening?

I think one of the ways to think about it is start by looking at the career options that you are interested in. For example, if there is a certain sector that you are trying to learn about every time you think about your skill, a skill in isolation has no value. But if you can solve a problem for somebody, then it has a value. So for example, I could say I love listening to music of a certain kind, but it has no value because it's just me. I'm listening to music for my pleasure. That's great. But to create value for someone means I need to solve a problem and which could be, I can write about music, or I could teach music to somebody, or I could sort of create my own album and sell it. So there are different ways in which you can create value for people. The same goes for any skill as you are trying to Solve a problem for somebody else. That's a great way in which you can create value for somebody and learn it well yourself.

Yeah, I like that idea. Just think about what problems do other people have, and if you can solve those, you're creating some value. Now, in your book, you used the phrase perpetual beta, saying basically any career is in the state where it's not quite done at any point. So how do you deal with that?

You know, look at it like this, that any field that you take today, it's changing because of legislation, it's changing because of economic realities, it's changing because of government policies, it's changing because of skill shortages. It gets changed dramatically based on natural disasters. So there are a million different factors. There could be war, there could be regulations, there could be new legislation. All, all of these creates opportunities, takes away opportunities. So opportunities are not static. If you think about the kind of degrees that some of the colleges offer today, many of these did not exist in the last three, four, five years. So the progressive organizations are always offering new kinds of degrees, new kinds of workshops, new kinds of skills to build. And they are doing it because there are opportunities where you can apply these skills and solve problems. So there are different capabilities that people need. For example, if you think about data, the ethics of data is a field that is emerging because of all these things that I talked about. The European Union has regulations so that create its own set of things about what you can do, what you can store, how long you can store it, what format you can store it, what you delete, what you give back, et cetera, all of that. But if you think about it in another way, you can use the same thing, not just from a data point of view, but you can use it for, let's say, solving employee data. So what kind of data are employers allowed to keep? What kind of data can they not ask for? What kind of data can they ask for but not store? Each of these creates possibilities that you can develop little nuanced versions. You could write an algorithm to solve that problem. You, you could create a little piece of software that solves the problem. All these are different ways in which you can deal with it. So we are living in a world where your opportunities are really, really, really endless. So it's constantly evolving. So it's. Therefore, I started by saying it's a very exciting time to be alive.

I love the, a lot of the stuff you talk about there. You mentioned things like natural disasters, new regulations coming. Most people would see these as problems. But the way you described It. It was actually, oh, these are possibilities, these are opportunities. And so you've kind of taken this negative idea and turned it into a positive. And actually, so this reminds me. So we had Guy Kawasaki on the show last year. He was espousing Carol Dweck's idea of the growth mindset. And what you're talking about sounds very similar. So do you want to talk about how the growth mindset is related to the ideas you were talking about? Building expertise.

You know, the central idea of Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset actually talks about no matter what you can do, there are other things you can learn and add to yourself. So if you say, look at my knowledge of data science, is it great? No, it isn't yet. So the moment I add the word yet, it creates a possibility. It's not a closed door. So think about it like this. If I say that, oh, I'm not a person who can learn about data science, it's a closed door. But if you say, I haven't tried learning about data science yet, I'm actually opening the possibility and telling myself, I don't know it right now, but I could if I put my effort to it. And there are many simple applications for Carol Dweck's work. For example, when you see somebody trying to learn something, very often we look at the results and tell people that, okay, so you got a A in your term paper. That's fantastic. Except for the fact that when you raise results, it builds anxiety. Because now I worry about maybe this particular quiz was simple. I got an A plus. What if the next quiz is not as simple and I don't get an A plus, what happens? My averages go down. Oh, what if I got a D? Oh, that'd be terrible. So you kind of. It creates stress. So learning should not create stress. If you are focused on the effort that you put in that you put in a lot of effort, and it seems to have paid off. The moment you say that, then your focus is on the effort, not the outcome. So you almost put the focus back. It's 90% is really on the effort that you put in. You really put in so many ideas to work because you tried learning from this person, you learned from that, and this has really built a deeper understanding, and that's fantastic. So your effort has resulted in deeper understanding. The moment I frame it in terms of effort, I'm using Carol Dweck's work, and that is, I think, really powerful.

All right, cool. So the second skill you mentioned was around teaching Skills talk me through. Suppose you're learning something. Why might you want to teach it as well?

You want to teach it for two reasons. A, it is, if you think about it purely from selfish terms, that when you teach someone, your mind actually is far more alert because you know that you are going to have to teach somebody what you are just learning. You begin to process that information in different ways. So periodically, if you're reading something, take a break for five minutes. After you read, let's say for 15, 20 minutes, you read, you take a break and just say, what did I just read? How would I explain it to somebody who doesn't know this? And you create a simplified version of what you just read. That is a really, really powerful way in which it solidifies your own understanding and then find creative ways to do it. Can I do it visually? So that's what got me hooked onto all the sketchnotes that I use on my website or my LinkedIn newsletter. I use all the sketches to simplify what I'm doing. Sometimes I create a cartoon because I find a funny side to the problem and I create a cartoon with it or I'll illustrate it in some creative ways. It is a way in which I'm solidifying my own understanding of that. Two, when you put it in that forum for people to learn and learn and grow from, of course you're helping them. But what it also does is people will ask you questions, hey, you said this last year, you had said this. Which of these is true? How do you reconcile those? It sort of forces you to think about new kinds of ways, ways to structure your knowledge. So this whole two way process that teaching somebody creates is a really powerful way of learning. So if you think about, you know, there are of course, let's say you buy a mixer grinder, you buy anything you will have. You buy a new phone, you buy a new camera, the manufacturer creates a user guide. You know, it'll say, it's got these features, it's got this. That's one very structured way of doing things. But if you see the real value comes not from the structured ones, but those little bits and pieces that people have created. They say, oh, is your screen going blank every time you do this? Here is how I fixed it. I say, yeah, this is what I need. Because it talks about it in terms of problems and that is the best way to teach people what is the problem they will solve. Whereas when you look at the manufacturers, the mistake they make is they always solve it in terms of the knowledge flow that you are now unboxing it. There are two switches on the side. 3. People figure out a lot of these things themselves. But what happens is somebody could make a video and say there are three switches, not two. What is the third switch for? Now I'm interested. Yeah, this is the video for me. So when you create a searchable version for your idea, you're also helping yourself to frame that knowledge bit. So that's a really powerful way to do it.

That's very cool. So I do like the idea. I mean actually, well, lots of great ideas there. But I like the idea that teaching doesn't have to be like, okay, I'm standing up in front of a classroom and telling 20 people about what I know. It can just be as simple as if you learn something, then you take notes and then you're effectively just teaching yourself about the stuff that you've just learned. But I also like the idea of cartoons. That's a very cool idea. My cartooning skills are not great, but yet anyway. But yes, that is a nice way of just transforming the medium you're working in. It's going to help you think about what you just learned. All right, that's our last point about showing people what you've just been learning. That seems to naturally lead to the idea of building some kind of community about what you're learning about. Can you talk me through what tips do you have for building a community?

When you create a community of like minded people, it could be a community where they are exploring things. So for example, a book club is a good example of a community. So it just brings a couple of people in the neighborhood who meet to discuss the books that they are reading. Sometimes somebody will come up with an idea that you're trying to solve a problem, which is that a lot of writers, communities get writers together to say that, okay, you're trying to write a novel. I'm also trying to write a novel. What are you grappling with? And I could say I am grappling with the storyline. You could say you're grappling with the characterization of the things. And sometimes you can get a invite a writer, seasoned writer, who can come and say, here is how I do it. And it may trigger different possibilities in your head. So the whole idea for communities to expand your worldview beyond what you know and the way you framed it. So good example of that is some of these gaming consoles, et cetera. One of the big uses of these has been to get people to exercise in a very creative way that some of the People in senior living communities use these little Xbox games, et cetera. So they are trying to move with this and they are doing that. And that's a great way to think about exercise. You are not looking at it as a kind of punishment. So you can create opportunities where your solution actually helps to solve a problem for somebody else, which could be a very creative, different problem. Your podcast can solve a problem for me that I can listen to the podcast while I'm exercising on the treadmill. And instead of that being a chore, it becomes something exciting for me and I can say, wow, I can listen to a 40 minute podcast and I can walk for 40 minutes without having to say, oh, gosh, I have another 30 minutes of walking to do. It's a much smarter way of doing it. Wonderful.

All right, so first skill was storytelling. Now, on this show, we've had a lot of episodes around data storytelling. It's one of our favorite topics. One of the things that jumped out to me in the book was you advocated for this thing called the Pixar story structure. Now, like many people, I'm a fan of Pixar movies, so can you talk me through what is this thing?

If you look at any of. I mean, I've got too many favorites of these films, but if you take any of the Pixar movies, they all have a certain kind of a framework. They all look at that. And it's become so famous that it's now called the Pixar method, which is that it all begins with once upon a time, which describes the way the world was at one stage. So you say somebody was living in so and so place, everything was great. And you kind of describe how the life used to be. It was all peaceful, nothing went wrong, everything was perfect, everything was great. And then you introduce the most important element of storytelling, which is the conflict. And then suddenly one day, something happened. The person got lost, the person got hurt, or something happened. There were invaders, there was a monster, there was lightning, whatever. Something changed that old existing world order. So that's your third setup. And then you kind of move into the different aspects of the story because of that something happened then because those two things happened. Something else happened then because of that. So you can have a couple of versions of that. And then the final version is until the entire thing got sorted because the person who was lost got found and they were reunited and this thing happened. And it's a great way to end the story on a positive thing. But you'll realize one of the things which is not Talked about as as much is that in the picture structure, great storytelling actually begins when there is a conflict and stories end when it says and they lived happily ever after. So, you know, when there is no problem, it's actually the end of a story. So every time you're thinking of a story, you can say that, well, this is how you have been handling your data. Then one day this particular thing happens. Your server goes out and then your data is all gobbled. How do you retrieve it? Then the person tried to contact this, then they tried to do this, then they did this, and then all of that until they came to your solution and then you kind of, you know, solve the problem for them. So that's one of the ways in which, you know, you frame the story in this format. It's a time tested thing and it's a very powerful way. I love it.

So I definitely like the idea of having a structure to how you're going about telling your story. Yeah, maybe the new sort of career goal is to have like everyone in the meeting room just crying as though it's like a toy, like one of the Toy Story movies. Just have some sort of disaster, bring some emotion to your business meetings. That should be a lot of fun. Cool. So what was next? I think personal branding was your next skill. So I know you said it's important to have some kind of personal brand. Now I think this is something a lot of people get mixed up with. So what's the difference between having a personal brand and being an influencer?

An influencer is one kind of an application of a strong personal brand. But a strong personal brand can be in any profession. I mean, what do you think about your favorite sports person? So you have hundreds of people who play basketball and if I asked you who's your favorite basketball player? Part of it is that your favorite player is your favorite player because that's a strong personal brand in multiple things. But it's built on the central element that whatever is the kind of work that they do, they are better at it than anybody else. So that's the real essence of a strong personal brand. That whether it's your baseball player, whether it's your soccer player, whether it's your tennis player or artist or musician, anyone that you can think of, or your favorite data scientist, or, you know, the person you really look up to who changed that field, your favorite designer, all of them have one thing in common. They're pretty much the best in what they do. So the sense, the foundational piece without which nothing else happens. In your brand is that you're really, really, really, really good at what you do. Once you do that, then look at the other skills. We talked about that. How do you teach others? Because you're really great at it, which is fine, but it has no value for me because I'm never going to be as good. But imagine a series where your favorite sports person or your favorite musician says, I'm going to teach you 15 minutes every week how to play one guitar chord and do a variation. We'll pick one of my songs and we are going to play it along. And that's an amazing way to build a community. So you were asking, what's the right way to build a community? Take one of the things that you do best and then teach somebody else. That's one of the best ways to build a community. That's an incredible way to craft your personal brand. Because as you're helping people, your own craft improves, because teaching improves you. Teaching also improves the other person. And you're creating that community and your brand is built around that. The larger your brand, then the more number of people who find your content relevant and they find it interesting. So your skills are relevant for them. Because if somebody teaches you a skill which you have no idea what it is, take a sport which you have no interest in, and if that is what somebody's teaching you, you're not going to do that. If you're not a person who's interested in sports, and I give you 10 examples of that, you're not going to watch it. If you're not interested in movies, you're not going to watch it or the genre of movies. So it has to be relevant and it has to be interesting. So when you do that, the people who can do it well are not only great storytellers, they are also great personal brands. So that's what it is all about.

Okay, so I like that it's not. Well, I guess you said you've got to be an expert in something, and maybe that's the hard first step. But the personal branding element is around persuading other people or demonstrating to other people that you are this expert in.

This particular topic and that they can benefit from it. I mean, you build your personal brand. Influencers are people who are able to tell a lot of people in the audience that what they do, if they tried it, it could improve their lives in some way. So, you know, Mr. Beast has a very definite way of entertaining. MrBeast can almost compete with any of the movies that you see. You can either watch one of those episodes or you can do something like that. For those people who follow MrBeast, that's the community that he's built.

Okay, yes, there's a certain amount of consistency in the MrBeast style of communication.

I mean, I'm not saying that that's necessarily the recommended format for building a community. That's an example. But you can take any one of the people that you admire. All of them have their own style of doing something. So it's actually three things. I would say it's art, business and craft. So craft is that. Let's say if there are 20 versions of doing something you are so good, you know all 20 of them, that's your craft. Art is. You have almost created a 21st version of doing the same thing. It's your unique style. When I look at that, you can immediately make out, oh, this has to be done by so and so person. 3 is the business of it. So you are trying to solve a problem with that. Now that's really the third element. When you combine the. This is the ABC of the personal branding.

Okay, I like that. Mixing art, business and craft together.

Okay, Art, business and craft, all three. Art is equally important. You create your own style of storytelling.

Wonderful. All right, so skill number five is about having a portfolio of skills. So I guess this links nicely back to the career 3.0 idea where you've not just got a single area of expertise, you've got lots of kind of skills mashed together into a whole. So I guess how do you decide on like good pairs of skills or groups of skills to go together?

Sometimes the best pairs of skills are things that go together because it's the polar opposite. So people who are great at storytelling can learn about data, you know, understand the nuances of data, or people who are great in, let's say analytics can figure out how to convey it in a manner that which the business people can understand. So that's one of the ways to do it. Or teaching a language which is still emerging, nobody knows how to do that. It's cutting edge. It's just still emerging. Lots of things are happening. Can you make sense of it and simplify it for people? So there are multiple ways in which you can do that. Each time you are taking a completely different audience, you're creating your own pathway into a different network, a different ecosystem. So students is one ecosystem. Business professionals is another ecosystem. Colleagues is another ecosystem. Sports people is a third ecosystem. Movies is another ecosystem. So the more pathways in which you can build connections the greater way in which you can create opportunities for yourself. A wonderful way to do that is to think about all the hobbies that you had growing up as a kid. Each of them is potentially a different ecosystem. Like, I used to do a little bit of painting when I was growing up, and now I use it in the work that I do. I never did it with the idea that one day there's going to be something called social media and there's going to be something called blogging, and I'm going to do that. I just did it for the fun of it, or I wrote for the fun of it. I used to enjoy writing little stories. And then when, you know, at some stage I published a book and then I kind of said, how can I use this to write a newsletter? So you create that and then you say, how can I illustrate my own newsletter? And you create those possibilities. So you're continuously bringing those ecosystems together and you're also trying your way out into different ecosystems. So it's the polarity actually works really well.

That's really interesting. Talk about the idea that you take on skills and you have no idea whether they can be useful in the future. I was just thinking, like, early in my career, I used to work in a call center. It was in a. For doing debt collection. So I had to phone people up, ask them for money. Turns out this skill's really useful for podcasting because you have to contact people and ask them, oh, will you come on the show? It's very similar skill. I had no idea. I just thought it was a kind of rubbish minimum wage job at the time. But it's actually turned out to.

So is that how it works for everyone who's a guest on your podcast? You end up by saying, now, okay, can you give me the money?

Yeah, we'll have that conversation afterwards.

Nice.

Yeah, but that's cool. The idea, you don't necessarily need to know how you can use the skill at the time. It's just go and learn something, you might benefit later on, you might not. And we'll sort of see how you get on.

Actually, I think you're talking about something which I. Sorry, I interrupted you, but, you know, it just triggered an idea that lots and lots of organizations make this big mistake that before people have learned something, especially in a new area, they make it more about what is the ROI of learning this? When you start to do that, you are actually killing the enthusiasm of learning something new. Because when people are looking at learning something new, they have no idea whether they'll enjoy it, whether they'll be good at it, whether they'll abandon it halfway through or whether they'll go the whole hog and make that as the next big career shift that they will try. So allowing opportunities for people to sample different things and leave it, then maybe come back to it at a later point of time in a very different way. Start looking at the ROI of things that people have completed fully and they are able to use it because that's the time to measure it. Not at the beginning. It's after you've done that and you build that you've tried out the skill. Now people can start and don't make that measurement. The single biggest reason to invest in something or not invest. That's a straight sure fire way to kill curiosity in anything.

Absolutely and absolutely. I speak to a lot of learning and development managers through my career. There is often a lot of pressure on them to try and justify what the company's spending on training. And so you need to have some kind of measure of what counts as success for the training program or some sort of measure of return on investment. But actually for learners, maybe you just want to try stuff that is sort of related to your career and see how you get on and not have too much pressure at the beginning. So that's kind of interesting stuff. But we've still got one more skill to go that was about being part of multiple ecosystems that are unique. This is a bit of an interesting skill. Can you just tell me what you mean by that?

Think about yourself as a venture capitalist. What they do is they invest in many different kinds of startups. So one could be a startup in shipping, one could be a startup in healthcare, another one could be a data science related startup. Fourth one could be a sports related sports management startup. You need to know a fair bit about each of these to understand what is it that they are trying to do. Because at the end of it, you make the most amount of money when it solves a problem which nobody else has done before. But it also means that you are taking the greatest amount of risk. So being part of different ecosystems is about taking risks with the kind of people you hang around with. So if you hang around with sports people and music people and data science people and writers and people who are solving something, who are uber drivers, various things. The more diverse professions you hang around with, you begin to build a deeper understanding of your own profession and you build a deeper understanding of how you can solve problems for them. So you are constantly each different ecosystem can actually help you Discover opportunities that you otherwise would have had no idea. So it's a great way to find ways in which you can stay relevant. If one particular ecosystem is drying up, you can become a part of a completely different ecosystem and that creates opportunities for you.

I'm curious, how do you go about networking outside of your core area of expertise? How do you find all these other people to speak to?

It's pretty straightforward. If you're working inside an organization, if you're employed, then make time to meet up with your colleagues from completely different functions. If you're a data science person and you want to meet up with people in finance, or meet up with people who are in sales, meet up with people who are in marketing and learn about their work. What do they do, what kind of stuff, what's their day like? And start build friendships which are non transactional. So just be curious about the kind of work that they do. And maybe when you have met three, four, five people, have a meetup with all those five people, bring them together, and you might be creating a community of curious people like that. And chances are that maybe some of them know each other, some of them don't know each other. But the fact that you decide to hang around with each other, you build not only deep friendships, because your deepest friendships are sometimes built on people with whom it didn't start off as a transaction, it just started off as friendship in general. So I think that's the right way to sort of do it. But if you're outside of an organization, you're a sole contractor, you know, you work for yourself, then one of the ways to do it is when you go to any of these places, let's say you go to a conference or you join a webinar and engage with the people who are also there. So the more you speak up, the more you kind of share a point of view, the more you kind of say, this is what it is. And if you can't do any of those, create a little blog post saying, I attended this particular webinar, here is what I learned, here is what I did. And people will start engaging with you. Even if you don't necessarily reach out to a lot of people just doing that, social media makes it possible for you to do all of that. So that's how I kind of think about it.

That's wonderful. So now you've explained the answer. It just sounds like I asked how do I make friends? Which sounds terribly lonely, but yeah, many different ways to make friends. And I do like the idea of like don't just treat everything as a transaction. Just go and have a chat with people, maybe organize an event, and you're probably there. All right, so I had a lot of different bits of career advice there. What's the most important thing then? Like, do you have any final advice for helping people figure out their career?

Well, that's a tough one. But I would say that if you can bring a little element of fun and play into whatever you do, that's the most interesting way to stay relevant. Because, you know, when you're having fun, you'd like to try out many different things. Remember the time when you were growing up, you would have had your hobbies. You try out different things, and there was no pressure to say, okay, if you are making an omelet today, it means are you deciding and committing, therefore, for the rest of your lives that you will be a chef? Nobody said that. You tried out different things. Next day you painted something. Nobody said, okay, that means you're not going to be a chef. You will now be an artist. Stop thinking about it like that. Just enjoy and have fun in whatever you do. Build elements of play into it, and that makes it just more engaging out of that.

Yeah. Build elements of play into your life, into your work. It's the fun way to live. Excellent. Cool. So thank you so much your time. Abhijit.

Thank you very much for having me. I. I hope it's going to be of value to your audience, and I'm grateful that you had me on the show. Thank.

You.