Career is about Clarity, Not Content.

We have a bewildering amount of content available at a tap of a smartphone screen. In my pro-bono coaching work with young professionals and start up founders, i often sense a loss of language about a direction for the future. The template from our parents’ generation of a few jobs across a lifetime is no longer valid, as every job is projectized and line item budgeted. This is contributing to a sense of frustration even among the Oxon educated as career services are staffed with Counsellers and not job creators.

The issue is too much information, where are professionals are looking at person specific tailored solutions looking at the short term and the long term. If Facebook can create custom interfaces for each user based on our likes and shares, then the need is for job creators themselves to go out to the job seeker to go and tell stories that connect rather than job posts on LinkedIn and job boards which need a peculiar cv to pass through the filters predetermined by algorithms.

The job market is increasingly skill based and academics with PhDs are disconnected with the right skills that are needed. They are amazing for courses that are focused on fundamentals, but most young graduates seek a ROI on the crazy amounts of tuition paid to the university. The key is in connecting the graduate to the job market through internships as soon as possible. For older professionals seeking a pivot, should seek reskilling as a long-term priority as skills are not built overnight. Doing a couple of MOOCs does not make you valuable but building a skill that is needed often at the interface of two or three sub-disciplines.

Careers anchored in solving meta problems such as Climate Change will have various jobs at different points of their lives. The lack of mentoring is leading many careers going astray as the old playbook is almost obsolete. The clarity if achieved early in the career leads to creating options, which leads to resilience.

Young professionals can author an essay well, but they lack knowledge in seeking the right job, the calling which is needed and not all knowledge is on the web. Seek wisdom stuck in the heads of battle-hardened investors and founders. Podcasts convey success stories not when they encountered a bankruptcy.

Reinvention should be a must thought skill in school or otherwise. Think of a Vir Sanghvi when thinking about career pivots. We need to understand the hidden transcript of jobs which is not taught at university.

Survival as Innovation

Walking around the souks in Muscat, Nizwa, Sur or Salalah one normally comes across small and medium enterprises everywhere. The heart of the Omani economy is the small businessperson who meets quotidian concerns in the economy. In the backstreets of Ruwi, on Honda Road in Muscat is an example of the eclectic character of the traditional SME space in Oman. The computer retail and repair shop rubs shoulders with an engineering consultancy to an ethnic South Indian eatery.


All over Oman, the dominant category of business is one which does not have much bandwidth as the focus on the everyday makes the case for innovation hard in the western epistemic sense of the term, however everyday as a site of negotiation to survive is also innovation, the Omani way. How innovation is framed in the Omani SME context needs to be anchored in the local history and culture. SMEs in Oman are family owned and multigenerational hence innovation in the conventional sense might seem problematic. Hence innovation needs to be communicated as resilience for the SME rather than a fancy jargon.


SMEs in various parts of Oman have a variegated spectrum of anchor industries to service from Oil & Gas to the restaurant sector. SMEs are not a monolith and innovative interventions would need to map as per outcomes desired. The fragmented nature of the SME also needs innovation to realize economies of scale with each SME plugging in a specific node in the value chain, including retaining In Country Value as a part of localization requirements. The economies of scale through the innovation glue will factor in the pace and the cultural instincts of the SME community in Oman which is of glacial place but of solidity.

Loyalty is a State of Mind.

I would really suggest my country men to tone down their acerbic nationalism when overseas as if things were that great back home you would not have applied for the PhD here, funded by local taxpayers right?

Practice gratitude, loyalty is not defined by your travel document.

theory is for research papers not for transgenerational migrants such as me! It’s lived experience as we live fragments in many places in an archipelagic manner (hat-tip to Prof Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Ari Gautier !)

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