Have you ever heard of a flying ladder? This refers to a ladder of employment discovered in the West which flew East, creating a wave of employment opportunities.

When it landed in the East, especially in India, it was called it the ladder of service. Recently, people looked at the same ladder from the other side and exulted, then named it the product ladder. From there evolves the story of service and product companies—a ladder with two sides.

When opportunities increased with the two sides of a ladder, so did the volition and confusion. If I were to explain what it requires to swirl, switch or even choose between those two ladders then all my talks lead to one word: skill. If you have the right set of skills then you can switch or choose. All one must do is sell their competency in the areas they excel at and whatever they think is relevant to that respective field or ladder. Before you switch, learn that one ladder differs from the other. Let’s take the oldest of the ladders: the service ladder, a highly regarded and most widespread in the country. Services project crews are different for every project—each one starts their work from basic building blocks and spends most of their time working on what somebody else has created.

In a product company the crew remains the same for all the products developed, be it new or old, and each one contributes to the already existing basic building blocks. As you learn the basic differences, make sure your next switch is something exclusive for you and don’t falter. Say, for example, one chooses to work in a product company.

Then they would obviously enjoy the advantages of sustained operation, skill utilization and value chain movement. They tend to think that work content is of higher echelon and they are working with good content, this in turn brings in confidence and a kind of challenging spirit. But if worked for a services industry before, there could automatically be a feeling that product companies do less time-bound and smaller projects. However, I would say, working in a product company would introduce identity confirmation, and in a services firm, an identity crisis.