It’s been two years since I graduated from college — long enough for the feelings of being a full-time classroom student to almost fade away, and a new paradigm of thoughts comes in. While I used to wonder “Will I be able to do X?”, now I start to ask “What do I want to do?” That is because I have learned that, the more time and energy I put in, the more wondeful things that I can accomplish. When I look at the next 10 years of my life, I see an enormous amount of time and energy to manage.

What-to-do is not at all an easy question. Even for a week, it is already tricky for me to know what I should do. I have to rely on external tools such as journals, calendars, todo lists (still struggling), project boards, and so on. Those tools summarize the complexity of our life into a frame of view, aiding our emotion-driven minds. Now to manage the energy in the span of years, I need an even more powerful summarization tool.

A tool we have been using to summarize our past is our curriculum vitae (CV). It lists the major things we have done professionally. Those things are projects at work (professional experiences), projects at home (personal projects), and projects at school (coursework). These cover all the data we have about our professional selves. Hence, it should be a valuable source of information to guide our career pathways.

However, I never looked at my CV when planning my future. Thinking of my CV, I tend to think of a bragging ground rather than a planning aid. Instead of bringing clarity to myself, my CV has been meant to impress other people. And when it comes to this type of documents, people have thousands of tips about word choice and formatting to make it look more shiny, more convincing, and more likely to help someone get a job interview.

Can we turn our CVs into something that helps us understand ourselves better, as in journals and calendars? Can our CVs be rewritten to provoke thoughts for our future?

The the problems, the skills, and the projects in between

Last month, I reunited with a friend who worked in the motion picture industry1. We graduated from the same university in Vietnam, and happened to both be around New York City at that time. We talked about arts, science, and careers. Throughout the conversations, I noticed that we are extremely different in the nature of our profession — she practices arts, I do science; she has 300K instagram followers, I attend 4K-attendee conferences. However, there were not that many differences in the way we approach our futures. We are aspired to improve our own arts. We can agree on what problems are worth solving. And we solve such problems in our own ways. As an actress, my friend tells powerful stories through her movies, making people feel heard, who would otherwise suffer from the loneliness of their personal hardship. As a computer scientist, I study ways to enable machines to recognize hateful memes for early intervention, while generating genuinely fun and wholesome contents for internet users. In that sense, we are both using our skills to make people suffer a little less.

From that encounter, I started to see that our careers are really a collection of dots on a coordinate plane. The plane have two axes: horizontally is the skills we have and vertically is the problems we care about. Each dot on the plane, then, is a project in our CV. And the way we fill that coordinate space — which I call the Problem-Skill Landscape (PSL, pronounsed as /pixel) makes up our CV, our career, and our life.

With that, I sat down to draw my own PSL. I drew the Skills and the Problems axes. Next, I put labels on the two axes:

  • On the Skills axis, I put: search, linguistic/NLP, computer vision, program analysis, stastistics/machine learning, robotics, social sciences, algorithm analysis, and software engineering
  • On the Problems axis, I put: theoretical understanding, porverty/inequality, climate change, labor productivity, mental health/ethics, and market demand.

While I could write down the Skills axis pretty quickly, I couldn’t substantiate the P axis in one go, perhaps because I did not think much about the types of problems I have been tackling. Instead, I went through each skill on the S axis, recalled the projects I have used that skill for, then tried to put the marker of that project horizontal with the corresponding problem it solves. If such problem is not on the P axis yet, I added them.

Figure: My PSL. I like that it looks like a stary night. Each project is a star on the night sky, representing a wish to use one skill to solve one problem.

My first feeling after seeing my PSL is a sense of pleasure. Instead of the wall of text on a resume, the landscape is visual and compact, summarizing the same career. Usually, in networking events, I only see people talking about their careers in one dimension: “I have been working on problems A and B”, and “I have skills C and D”. When they start to go deeper into what they actually did, they seemed to try to connect the skills and the problems. But the language breakdowns, disabling the listener to understand the connections. I think a career landscape is at least two-dimensional, if not more. PSL is a tool to communicate that in an instant.

The PSL is good at contextualizing what we do professionally. I am usually in paranoia about my unexecuted ideas: not knowing what to do next, and fearing I may forget the really important ones. The PSL drawing brought to me an instant relief. I now can put those ideas as points on the PSL. By doing so, I immediately contextualize the idea by knowing that it is a project that uses skill X to solves problem Y. For example, the statement-based budget logging app I am building is using my software engineering skill to solve the labor productivity problem. My ICAPS paper is a project to use my knowledge of search to advance the theoretical understanding of that very field.

The PSL raises productive questions about the problems that my energy has been used for. At first, it helps me see (for the first time) those problems. Upon that, I can ask: (1) why have I been working on these problems? (2) what does it say about my values? and (3) what among those do I want to approach more intentionally? Given that impacts are made when problems are solved, these questions are very impactful.

Not only about problems, the PSL can also provoke thoughts about your skills. When you see a skill being used in a lot of projects, you know that you have a very convincing ways to tell people that you are good at that thing. And when you see a skill column being empty on the PSL, you know it is underutilized. My girlfriend once said to me “I wish I can find ways to leverage my English ability more in my jobs”. Such wishes are highly effective in guiding our careers. The PSL can help detect those opportunities. Furthermore, because the PSL is so compact, it is hard for you to forget the idea as there is an empty column on the landscape staring back at you, saying that the skill is not being used.

Your PSL

Figure. My PSL, redrawn using Google Sheet. It is more neat, but kinda losing the starry-night vibe…

When people draw their PSLs, I expect it will vary as follows:

  • The Skills labels depends on your field and your range of interests. Someone in business may have project management, presentation, networking and connections, power BI, market research. Someone in a technical fields will have the field’s relevant techniques taking up most of the Skills axis
  • The Problems labels depends on your seniority level:
    • If you are a student, you may not have chances to solve groud breaking problems yet – it is okay to just have “academic understanding”. But a lot of students will have extra curricular activities and class projects, which are usually channel towards solving some problems. As long as you have done some projects, you will find the problems that you have attempted to tackle.
    • The more senior you are, the more projects you have done, the better you can verbalize the domains you have worked on. They can be human-driven problems like the UN development goals. They can be academic problems within your fields. They can be markets segments/sectors in business.
    • Andd if you are an organization, things will be different. For a research lab, skills will be about techniques that the PI and students are good at. Problems will be literally problems to be solve in their field of study. For a company, same story, only more business driven.

What does a PSL of a successful person look like? I think there is no such a single “successful PSL”. Some people will want to have as many dots as possible on the landscape, i.e., the jack-of-all-trades. Some will want to have a very tall landscape, i.e., to solve a lot of problems. Some will want to have a very wide one, as in the polymaths.

Departing thoughts

  • An ideal career compass is a something that will give you more clarity into what you have done, and inspire you for the next projects you do, next problems to solve, or next skills to learn.
  • Most of our projects are about using one skill that we have to solve one problem that we care about. Your portfolio is essentially the set of points on the Problem-Skill Landscape.
  • The landscape cannot answer all your questions. It is just another way to represent your past experiences and future opportunities. The answer still lies inside you.
  • After all, the PSl does not replace your CV. Instead, it is a complementary tool to help you plan your future career.

With that, you are invited to draw your own Problem-Skill Landscape. Want a resum—I mean—PSL review? I got you!

Footnotes

  1. Okay I meant the film-making industry. I just like that phrase I heard from Kieu Chinh, a legendary Vietnamese actress, and want to preserve it.. ↩