How to make complex decisions or how I rebuilt my career

I am currently in a situation where it's difficult for me to return to my previous position in a new country, so I decided to share how I planned my career in Spain.

From 2006 to 2016, I was learning and learning to wё1ºork. I started my career at McDonald's, then became the training director at Burger King in Saint Petersburg (Russia), worked as a communication designer and analyst at Russian Helicopters. In 2016, I transitioned to digital product management, stayed with this choice, but continue to expand my knowledge in this and related areas.

Ikigai

I used the principle of IKIGAI and created a clear but flexible vision of my career to quickly adapt and make decisions. My ambiguous skill — fortunately and unfortunately, I am very curious and interested in many things, which helps and hinders in choosing a profession. My strong skill is to teach others and assemble and manage teams, which relates to three types: meta, soft, and hard.

I entered all my main skills (hard skills), additional skills (soft skills), and my preferences into an application: what I like to do and what I would like to do. I used Apple's Freeform, but there are many such applications, for example, you can use Figma Jam, a free and accessible platform.

Every day I spent 20 to 30 minutes studying these scattered words in a chaotic order, trying to find connections between them and understand how to apply all this in life and what should be discarded.

As a result, I moved everything around a lot, created and destroyed connections, but in the end, I got what I needed.

Starting Point

Everything starts from today, the moment I ended my career in Russia as a product marketing manager. This is a foundation I am satisfied with, and I would not want to start over in a completely different field. I enjoyed this job.

Principle of Development

As a product manager, I have always worked with reports and figures, and a large part of my work involved creating databases and analyzing them. Besides the standard metrics and reports, I am particularly proud of two projects.

The first project is a training management system for all Burger King employees in St. Petersburg. It was a challenging task, as we were constantly opening new restaurants and actively growing. I created a training tracking system for all categories of employees in all areas with a restaurant inspection system.

This not only allowed us to see the training needs for individual restaurants and the entire network at any given moment, but also to identify the needs of new restaurants. The inspection system allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of restaurants, influence training needs, and help restaurants and managers understand where the training system was failing within the restaurants.

My second favorite project is the creation of a networking system for a helicopter factory between department directors and key partners. As a result, I not only received information on how effectively the directors worked with partners, but also how much achieving goals ultimately cost. Additionally, it became evident who among the directors was spending more resources and achieving fewer goals.

By understanding these two projects and my attitude toward them, I was able to eliminate the unnecessary and find not only the primary skill I want to learn and practice, but also to discard secondary things from another section, which I will discuss later.

Need for Learning

I have understood the direction in which I want to move and have developed a training plan to achieve this goal. Very simply, it looks like this:

In principle, this is where we can end, especially if you are simply making a decision. But I will go a little further to understand more and make the plan more sustainable, to doubt less and not get distracted by unnecessary things.

Long-term Vision

The world is changing too quickly, so putting all your chips on one square is very risky. I have discarded a lot of unnecessary things, but at the same time, I have formed a flexible vision of the future. This will allow me to make decisions more easily when sharp changes occur around me and will not let me stray from the path.

Therefore, it is possible that I will remain in the field of data analysis and actively use additional skills that I have mentioned below, or I will move into the field of data science.

Maybe I will return to product management. And I will grow in the direction of becoming a CEO or I will start a startup.

Perhaps, I will still be a data analyst, telling the world interesting stories based on data with interactive infographics and other features.

This is a career development plan from the perspective of hard skills.

If you only focus on your job, you will do it poorly

Therefore, I wrote down everything that interests me, found what can create synergy with hard skills, and discarded everything else.

I like studying and understanding myself; it makes my life easier every time. Therefore, I want to create a community for those who are also interested in this idea and want to study cognitive science in a simple and accessible form. I already had a successful self-development project under the brand NotNowSchool, but after Russia's attack on Ukraine, I decided to close it. Starting this project was scary and required effort, but now I have an internal drive to continue. What you are reading now, ksnk.media, can be called a relaunch of my first project, but it is already a completely different project.

Having and developing something of your own that grows every day and benefits people is a pleasure that cannot be compared to simply working in a company. For example, I really enjoyed working as a product manager. This position was much cooler and better paid than working at Burger King, but I value it more. There, I managed everything and created everything. My DNA permeates every corner of the restaurant I opened, all operational and training work, and of course, the people I influenced.

I am convinced that even if you have a great job and do not want to leave it, it is great to turn it into something more. Sometimes, work can provide you with many materials that you can use to build your personal brand and develop your projects. And it may turn out that your projects will bring you incomparably more money than your job, but without it, you will have nothing to "feed" your projects.

Example

What I mentioned earlier.

Desires and interests that will bring additional value to my work as a data analyst or product manager.

Storytelling and visual thinking help convey informative stories with data not only at work but also at conferences. They also help colleagues from different departments understand you by the fifth slide. Not to mention that in Google's data analysis course, storytelling is dedicated to 1/7 of the entire course.

Writing articles helps not only retain information in memory but also deepen my understanding of the material and develop a personal brand.

Notion templates can help those who are starting their careers and developing their tools. They can also assist in communicating with the team and in presenting concepts, indirectly contributing to the development of a personal brand. You can always say: here, I have a model, we can start with it. But I go even further, and gradually create 3 large tools that will bring immense benefits.

Self-development and knowledge are what we should have been taught in school. Now we must figure it out ourselves to understand how everything works, learn to understand ourselves, and manage ourselves effectively. This helps lead a more fulfilling and happy life, which reflects on work and makes you a "star" employee who not only performs their job well but also has certain advantages, including a "positive aura."

Soft skills, meta-skills, and even hard skills. These principles and thoughts have guided the construction of my seven-year career vision.

As always, I invite you to share your opinion in the comments
With love 😽 🤗 😘
K