In April, I floated a survey on What do you want to be in your career and I received a great response from many folks within a week of sharing the survey. So much so that I had to purchase a basic plan on survey monkey to analyze the results properly and quickly.

In the 7-question survey, overall results from the four central questions are shown below.

1. What is you career development/growth aspiration?

36% folks want to become entrepreneurs followed by 35% folks who are looking for a new team or promotion to a new team. This is true for individual contributors and managers. This question allowed multiple-choices so do not try to add to 100%.

What is surprising is that almost 60% people are looking at new roles, new teams and new companies to meet their career aspiration. Very few people (31%) think of current team to be able to provide opportunities for their career growth.

2. What actions can help you meet your career aspiration?

The top three choices here are – talking to seniors and colleagues (66%), acquiring new technical skills (57%) followed by acquiring soft skills (55%). As expected, individual contributors care less about soft skills but most about technical skills followed by talking to seniors and colleagues. However, managers care less about technical skills compared to soft skills.

3. How frequently do you think about career development & growth?

91% people actively think about career growth while only 3% do not think about it. Those who are frequently thinking about career development are looking at entrepreneurship and new teams. Entrepreneurship is the top choice for managers and new team for individual contributor.

It will be interesting to correlate employee engagement and career development results. A recent Gallup survey showed 87% employees worldwide are disengaged in their jobs. I see a strong correlation here and it is plausible that career growth issues are responsible for some of the disengagement. But I did not ask a direct question about current engagement.

4. How often do you check careers of your peers, colleagues & seniors to get some ideas for career path?

88% people check careers of others and 63% does so very often. I think this also tie down to 66% folks talking to seniors and colleagues when planning their career growth.

I calculated Pearson correlation coefficient using joint probability distribution between how frequently someone thinks about career development & growth with how often someone checks others career. A result of 0.57 shows a fairly good correlation between these two variables. What it means is that someone thinking frequently about one’s own career is often looking at others career path.

If you need raw results, please leave a comment below.