Since the beginning of 2022 I have conducted career development workshops with hundreds of employees, to teach them the mindset, skills and practices to help them manage their career. One of the most common themes I hear from these sessions is that people understand that in order to achieve their goals and personal happiness with their work and career that they need to take ownership of it, and then need to put in effort outside of working hard and doing a great job in order to do it, but when it comes to figuring out what specific actions they need to take, or what direction they need to go in, they often get stuck.
But these individuals are not the only ones who are thinking about their careers. Research from Gloat suggests that 48.1% of employees are looking for a new job within the next 90 days, and about 30% of employees don’t feel like their employer has outlined a path to professional development.
Well-intentioned employers understand that many employees want more opportunities for career development, learning and growth. They buy course libraries of thousands of on-demand learning programs,, they bring in guest speakers or thought leaders, they provide a guide around the performance management process, and they create leveling guides that detail the various levels and promotion criteria. And while some of these are helpful , most of these are efforts that help generally but don’t necessarily help specifically.
If your employer does these things, that’s great, and you should definitely pay attention and make use of what’s useful. But letting your career development be dedicated by an org chart or someone else always ends in you working toward a goal that’s not yours. There are better ways.
Making Time For Career Experiments
An experiment (like the ones we learned in science class in middle school) is a procedure designed to test a hypothesis as part of the scientific method. In this case, the scientific method is our career, and the hypothesis is just merely an educated guess about something in our career that we are interested in or curious about.
Career experiments give us permission to explore and learn about something that is interesting or meaningful to us. They also provide us space to fail, learn, and try again. Intuitively, we all know that these are things that are important, but we often fail to create conditions to do this.
Just like a science experiment, a career experiment has merit, but when it succeeds and when it’s proven false. Instead of approaching our career development as having a clear sense of the 10 steps you need to take on a clear path, you can think more about intentionally trying something out, learning, and then taking a step.
And for some, the experiment scope might mean actually figuring out if a particular path is as interesting and exciting to you as it seems, but it can also be something much smaller.
You might be wondering, that sounds great, so how do I do this? I want to give a couple examples of how I’ve seen people take advantage of experimentation to lead to opportunities, learnings and paths in their career, that you can try on for yourself.
#1: Sharing your knowledge and experiences with others
Diego Granados was able to make a career transition into Product Management after getting his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. After entering the field, Diego got many questions from MBA students and other PM aspirants about how to transition into the field. Diego wanted to help, but realized that doing 1:1 informational interviews could only go so far, so he started writing blogs on the topic, and eventually posting on LinkedIn a YouTube channel, and co-leading a LinkedIn Group called PM Masterminds, to help aspiring PMs break into Product Management.
This opportunity allowed Diego to strengthen his skills in communicating, public speaking, content creation (all valuable things to PMs) as well as to meet thousands of new people. And most recently, Diego actually took a new job as a Product Manager at LinkedIn, to be a PM for their Career Product. Given Diego’s background and journey, I can’t think of a better person to do this.
Lesson: Diego started creating content as a way to give back and help others but to do so in a scalable and time efficient way. Along the way, he picked up new skills and strengthened existing ones that made him better at his day job, but opened him up to future opportunities. Diego didn’t necessarily set out to get a new job working on a career product for LinkedIn, but because of his willingness to experiment and try, to help others, and to connect, that’s exactly what he did
#2: Working with People and Building Relationships To Identify Career Opportunities You Can’t See
Natasha Chan has made multiple career transitions, and even served as Associate Director of Career Management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she helped hundreds of students make career transitions. One of the ways that Natasha has kept an open mind with career experimentation and being purposeful about managing her career is through connecting and building relationships with peers and colleagues that she shares interests with.
After making the transition from higher education to an enablement and training role at a software company, Natasha joined one of the ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) to build connection and community with fellow colleagues. This was especially important to her, as she started her new role during COVID-19, and having peers to engage with outside of her team was incredibly helpful for onboarding and building connections.
After about a year in the role, Natasha started thinking about how she wanted to continue to grow and develop, and continued meeting with people she met through the ERG to share what she was doing and to inquire about things that piqued her interest. Eventually, someone else in the ERG found a role that matched exactly what Natasha was looking for.
Prior to hearing about the role, Natasha didn’t know much about the team or what they did, but after doing her research she realized it met all of the things she wanted to advance and grow in her career. Natasha ended up making the move from enablement and training, to a strategist role working in the pre-sales process with customers.
Lesson: As I’ve written about previously, careers are a team sport, not an individual one. You only know what you know, but when others around you know your interests, skills and strengths, they can often spot opportunities – it starts with putting yourself out there, and designing opportunities to connect and learn
#3) Finding ways to integrate your interests into your responsibilities
Nick deWilde has spent his career working in talent development. After graduating from Stanford GSB, Nick served as the Managing Director of Tradecraft, where he helped hundreds of talented people navigate career transitions into design and marketing roles at high-growth startups. Nick has always loved writing and prior to GSB, even pursued a career in Hollywood. While it wasn’t for him, he very much wanted to keep writing in his life, and has been blogging externally and writing internally for over a decade.
In 2020, Nick decided to move on from Tradecraft and found a new role at Guild Education as a Product Marketing Principal. As a career expert, Nick was intentional about selecting a role where he could find ways to integrate writing and publishing content into his day to day role, and even helped design the strategy for how employees could publish their own content to advance their career and the employer brand.
After doing this role for about a year, Nick reflected on what he had learned from this experiment, and realized that while he liked it there were lots of other interests that he had. He eventually chose to leave Guild to pursue a solo-path, where he gets to write, build community, invest, and work on other projects. Important to him. Nick very much has a “portfolio approach” to his career, and writing is very much a part of it.
Lesson: We don’t know where experiments will lead us, but when we take time to reflect on them and to learn from them, they can lead us to the next opportunity. Furthermore, spending time experimenting compounds. Nick’s newsletter, Jungle Gym started in 2019 or 2020, but he had been writing extensively on these topics since 2013. Even when something doesn’t show its outcome in the short term, it does have value over time
#4) Focusing on things that have a deep meaning to you
Becca Jordan Wright loved her Grandma’s “pennies,” a cheese snack that her Grandma made for her when she was a child. When she shared them with her friends, Becca’s friends loved them too. This made Becca curious about whether or not she could turn this into a business.
Fortunately for Becca, she was in her final year of business school at UNC Kenan-Flagler, and already had secured an offer to return to Facebook after she graduated. At this point she had nothing to lose, so she decided to try to build a business and to take her Grandma’s recipe, and share it with the world.
While it wasn’t easy, Becca experienced more success than she could have imagined, thanks in part due to her willingness to explore, and use all the skills and resources she had at UNC to make this experiment a reality. Eventually had to make a hard decision: keep growing the business, or take her full-time offer at Facebook? After reflection and thought, Becca decided to keep going with the company and turned down the full-time offer.
Lesson: Things that have a deep meaning to us usually give us extra inspiration to work on, especially when there are challenges or tough moments. What’s exciting about this opportunity is that Becca could have easily coasted during her final year of business school and accepted her offer, but she was curious enough and paid attention to both the feedback she got when others tried her cheese pennies, as well as her own internal curiosities and thoughts about wanting to find a way to share these with a greater audience.
#5) Using a challenge or setback to reflect, learn, and experiment
When I first started at Deloitte, I had an idea of what I thought I needed to do in order to be successful as an analyst and how to advance my career, but boy was I wrong! My first performance review was not great, and it was clear that there was a lot I had to learn. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about before, learning how to manage and advance your career is not something that is taught or comes natural. So I went out and sought advice. Immediately after that review, I was able to get on a project with a Manager who was exceptional but who also created an environment where I felt like I could share my concerns and fears. I spoke to her about my rating, and asked for advice on how to navigate my career in such a high-performing environment. Over the next 6 months, she worked with me to teach me the mindset, skills, and actions that I needed to do to actively manage my career. The next year, I got the top rating.
From there, other employees at my level started coming to me for advice on how to manage their career. I started off very much like Diego, and did a lot of 1:1 conversations with individuals which was helpful but time consuming.
My manager (now a mentor) encouraged me to use my knowledge in other ways within Deloitte, and eventually, I led the undergraduate recruiting efforts for my alma mater, became a mentor for the summer interns, and became a facilitator of consulting and leadership classes at the firm. Fast forward to today, where I very much do all of these things, but instead of doing them outside of my day job, they are my day job!
Lesson: Sometimes we face challenges and setbacks in our jobs and careers. But they also serve as teaching and learning moments. In my case, looking back, a poor performance rating is what spawned my own career as a workplace, career and leadership advisor and coach.
In the end, career experimentation is about intentionally designing opportunities to test your hunch or desire, executing them, and learning through the process about yourself. The goal here is not to win, the goal is to learn and keep exploring. It is easy to look at someone who has advanced in some way in their career, who quits their job out of the blue, or who makes an exciting transition and to think that it happened in a nice and smooth way, but underneath I can bet for many of them was a mindset of intentional and purposeful career planning, as well as a curiosity for experimenting and learning to find the next opportunity.
Principles For Running Career Experiments
- Make Time and Space – Intentionally carve out time to run an experiment. I don’t want to put quantities, but I’d say one a quarter is a great start.
- Ask For Guidance – Find a partner, or a mentor who has run a similar experiment, not to copy, but to share your progress with, and provide perspective
- Reflect on what you’ve learned – Action is the result of doing, but reflection is what drives the learning and the next actions. Once you’ve finished, make sure to think about what you’ve learned, and how it can move you forward
- Enjoy the journey – The throughline for each example I gave is the individuals genuinely enjoyed the thing they were doing for their specific experiment. I think if we all found a little more joy in our work or in our days, it would make us a little bit happier. Career experiments can do that.
These are just some examples of ways you can try experiments in your own career. I hope these inspire you to commit to executing an experiment, and learning from it, whether it’s to help you enjoy your job today, or to find the next role.