I was asked to give a talk on career development advice for a group of early career professionals, based on my own career and helping thousands of people navigate career changes. Here is a summary of the talk, and the lessons I have learned and tried to practice in my own career.
First, to get started, why are we are? We are here for the following reasons:
- Employers need to help employees with career development – 39% of people who left a job said so because their company wasn’t offering career development opportunities. Furthermore, 94% of employees said they would stay if a company invested in their learning and development
- Employees have to own their careers: 43% of employees said their career development took a backseat during the pandemic. 2/3rd’s of managers are failing to support their employees in their career growth,
TLDR: You have to take ownership of your career, because nobody else is going to. Here are some ways in which you can do that
6 Lessons on How to Manage Your Career
I started my working life when I was 12. My first job was working at a golf course, and I had a lot of fun. I got to be around good people, learned how to build relationships and how to handle difficult conversations at a very young age, all while being outside in the sun and good weather. But best of all, I got to play golf and eat free food. What that experience taught me was that when you get to do something that you can use your talents and skills to contribute to something alongside others and in the service of others, you can find a lot of excitement and meaning.
But more importantly, this was a transformational moment in my life and development – I was a quiet kid at the time. I had some interests (sports) I was decent in school, but I was still not quite sure who I was. Taking this job was a pivotal moment – I was about to enter my teenage years – that job gave me the confidence to start leaning into who I was, and to feel a sense of belonging to something and pride in who I was. Anyone who has ever been a teenager knows how important that is. This job was a catalyst for my growth and development as an adolescent, and shaped so much of who I would become. Not to mention, free food, golf, and a little money to spend each week as a teenager is about as good as it gets.
Since then, I’ve worked a number of jobs, but have also taken an interest in careers, talent, and the workplace. I fundamentally believe in the goodness and talents that exist in all humans, and work and our career is a great place to showcase those talents and skills. Since then, I’ve gone on to study, research, talk, breathe, and live work, people, and careers.
In addition to working as a management consultant and product marketer, I’ve
- Founded a career coaching business and coached hundreds of career switchers
- Talked and written about the career trajectories of 500+ MBA students and Alum
- Had thousands of conversations about career growth, talent development, and employee engagement with professionals, managers and leaders
- Written a book, launched a podcast, and written hundreds of articles about the workplace and developing people
I don’t say those things to wow or impress you, but rather, to provide context for how I see the world, but to also illustrate how much I believe that creating a world, institutions and organizations where people have jobs and careers that maximize their skills to contribute to something outside of themselves is something I believe strongly in, and am dedicated to. This is what gets me excited everyday, and why I’m grateful for the work I get to do.
Today, I want to share six lessons about forging a career in today’s workplace and organization that I want to share from my own learnings. But to kick off this talk, I want to start with a quote from the statistician, George Box. George Box once said,” All models are wrong, some are useful.”
In the context of this talk, I think all career advice is wrong, some is useful. Without context, career advice is meaningless. All of it can be useful, in the right context. Whatever I share with you, think about it in the right context. So with that, let’s get started.
1)There is no one way to do it
There isn’t a silver magic bullet for one way to be successful and grow your career. It doesn’t exist. There are billions of people on this planet, and we’ll think, work, and operate in different ways.
If we look back at some of the people we consider to be successful, and take a look and deconstruct what they did to be successful, I think you’ll find a lot of different ways they went about setting and defining goals, pursuing paths, and achieving their desired results.
But sometimes, hearing that “there is no one way” can be challenging in understanding ways to to think about career development and growth, so I want to highlight four common ways that you can think about it.
- Ladder – This one is usually pretty understandable, and something that many of us understand. This is all above looking at career growth as linear, and growing as a means of getting higher up, getting ahead and doing so as fast as possible. At one point in time, this was seen as the predominant way of viewing career development and growth. But today, there are many other options (although it is seen as the predominant way in some industries)
- Lattice – Within the last decade or so, we started talking about the career lattice. This idea was formed in 2010 from Cathy Benko, a Senior Partner at Deloitte. This was the notion that instead of climbing straight up, we could go across, and sideways and in a lot of different directions with career moves and transitions. It was helpful because it helped us breathe a sigh of relief because the lattice opened the door to think expansively about the next moves we could make in our career.
- Wave – This model encourages us to think about our careers just like a surfer would – we can catch a good wave early in our career, ride it out, and once it fails, spend some time looking for the next wave.The purpose of the wave is meant to illustrate the fast-changing nature of the work environment and industries and market’s in today’s technology driven age. Or, we have events like global pandemics, which both start new waves to catch (where jobs are plentiful) and crest certain waves (where jobs wash ashore) Each wave gives us the chance to gain something new – new skills, experiences, as well as a chance to re-train and train. Furthermore, in between waves, we have a chance to figure out how we want to prepare or train for the next wave – unique to this is that it makes training (or perhaps education) continuous and lifelong, which is different from our traditional high school to higher education model which we have today
- Portfolio – This idea, portfolio of work we can have that exists far beyond one job. Thinking like your career as a portfolio means using your skills in many ways through multiple “jobs” or income sources, rather than just one job at a single company. Just like a venture capitalist or stock broker invests in a portfolio of companies, you are investing your skills (to generate returns through income) in multiple different avenues. While this is most commonly seen in industries where freelancing reigns (ex: journalism, design, entertainment) it can also be a lens of thinking about having a full-time job but also building a side hustle.
The TLDR of all of this: None of them are the only way to think about your career strategy, you just need to find the one that works for you.
2) Career growth is a balance of thinking and doing
My hunch is that all of you are here because you care about your careers and are trying to take action to move in a positive direction. From my experience, there are two sides of the spectrum that need to exist together: Thinking and Doing. One side is the thinking people. They think about their career a lot, analyze it, lay out all the options, go through the pros and cons. That’s good, but you can’t think your way into a new career. If you want to be a professional NBA player, you can’t think or dream your way to the NBA.
The challenge with people who are trying to think their way into a new career is that progress is the result of action, and if you aren’t taking action, it’s hard to make progress
The other side is the “doing,” those are the people who are action oriented, running as fast as they can and checking things off the to do list. You cannot make progress without taking action, but without thought and intention behind the actions you are taking, you can go down paths that you don’t want
You want a blend of thinking and doing.
If you are here, you have done some thinking and doing.
2 things you need to do:
- Understanding the right balance for you – what’s the right balance of percentages?
- What is your bias towards – and how do you make sure you don’t get caught in that
If you struggle with analysis paralysis, how can you catch yourself to say alright I’ve thought about this enough, what’s the one thing I can do to take action and get unstuck?
On the flipside, how can you take a deep breathe, to understand what dod I just do, what did I learn, and is that moving me in the right direction I intend?
Whatever you want to do, you have to balance both
TLDR:
- You can’t think your way into a new career
- Inertia without intention isn’t strategi
3) You don’t just “figure it out” – It’s a journey, not a destination
A common phrase I hear from people who are thinking about their careers is this desire to just “figure it out,” or putting the goal down to “figure it all out.” I think this puts an undue amount of pressure on a professional to achieve a goal that I don’t think really exists.
This is something that comes up alot with MBAs students I work with. People attend Full-Time MBA programs because they are using it as a vehicle and vessel for getting to a new career. They write their essays on their career goals, and then use their time in business school and all the learning and resources to achieve that desired goal. When they get their dream internship or full-time job offer, they are ecstatic. But somewhere later on, say within 6-18 months, some of them realize that what they are doing, is not in fact what they want, or at least, not what they want anymore. In some cases, it’s because they truly don’t like it even though they thought they would. In other cases, they are just over it.
The other set of students, comes into school and sees the opportunities that exist and gets super excited by these, but then struggles to figure out what they want. A lot of this happens because they see the potential in all these opportunities, and they can’t decide amongst a sea of great options. Truly a champagne problem, they put a lot of pressure on themselves to decide on the right choice.
In both cases, these individuals are treating the career as the destination, and not the journey. In both cases, dealing with the uncertainty that the thing they are doing or pursuing may not be the thing for them, is the feature, not the bug. The feature is that it is meant to be a journey, and not a destination. Career is not a one time thing that you just set and forget, but rather, an ongoing and continuous process.
For the majority of people who go to business school, they are in the age range of 25-32, if we take the average retirement age (65) 99.5% of people who graduate from business school, that first job is not going to be the last one.
There is a cognitive dissonance that exists, because they are so invested in wanting to land that dream career, that they miss the forest through the trees.
For many MBA alums who are a few years out, I often have the conversation where I hear this: I worked so hard to figure this out, “I thought I had it figured out..”
I don’t think for many of us, we figure it out, the joy comes in, in that it is a lifelong journey, and there are moments along the way that are meant to be enjoyed and lived. At some point, those moments may end, and it’s time to move onto the next thing
Many of us can put a lot of pressure to “figure it out” – accepting and acknowledging that you’ll never have it all fully figured out. It can be freeing – it removes a constraint. What often happens when you focus on figuring it out is that you put it on a pedestal, when it falls short of that of that expectation, you feel you are off, that it’s not right and that you are lacking. In reality, you are chasing something that is never going to be hit.
4) It’s best to start where you are – don’t worry about what you aren’t
This is especially true when you want to make a change in some capacity. If you’ve read anything about career changes, you know at a fundamental level, you have a set of skills and experiences that are valuable, and you have things you don’t have (say skills, experiences, job titles) but you might need in order to get to where you want to go.
It’s easier to fixate on what you don’t have than what you do. It is true that there are real limitations to getting a job in something that you don’t have experience or skills in. But a better place to start is understanding what you do have working for you, versus thinking that you can only start once you get to an improved version of yourself.
Yes, let’s acknowledge that career changes, especially large ones, do take some transformation. But, this is meant to acknowledge and recognize where you are right now is the best place to start. You don’t need to work on yourself before starting, you just need to start where you are.
Oftentimes, people put off deciding on a change, because they feel they don’t measure up, that they are less than, or aren’t nearly qualified to do a certain role or job. Research shows this is especially true when it comes to applying for jobs, especially for women and underrepresented populations. It may mean you need to do some extra work, but it shouldn’t hold you back to getting started on a change.
5) It’s yours to define
One of the most dangerous things we can do is to optimize for a game that belongs to someone else. The countless people who I have met who are optimizing for extrinsic measures of success. Now, let’s be clear: extrinsic measures are helpful in many ways. They tell us what good looks like, and give us guideposts to shoot for, especially when when don’t know or aren’t aware. But when you solely optimize for extrinsic, you get caught in the hedonic treadmill – no extrinsic measure of success will never keep you satisfied, it will just keep you striving for more and coming up empty. Extrinsic measures are important, but only when you also define internal measures of success. Only you know what those are and can figure those out.
When you make decisions based on measures of success that are someone else’s (your peers, the people you admire, culture/society, what you think other people want you to think success is” you start to optimize for a career and life that isn’t truly yours.
To start, consider asking these two questions:
- What does success mean to me? – How do you define success, and how do you measure it for yourself?
- What is something that I want to do that I would do wholeheartedly if I couldn’t tell anyone about it? – If you couldn’t get external validation, what would you do?
6) You don’t have to do it alone (think football or basketball, vs golf)
One of the things that bothers me about career changes is that they can be lonely experiences. You probably aren’t telling your boss or teammates, you might be able to tell your friends and family but they aren’t always knowledgeable. A lot of people I talk to is that it’s lonely
One of the things that is great about the MBA experience is that you can job search in public unapologetically, and with your peers together. You all are kind of working toward a similar goal, you all are sharing the highs and lows that come with meaningful and impactful experiences, and you all have a group of people to co-create with, test ideas, share feedback, and in some cases, complain and bitch to. This can be extremely helpful to navigating and thinking through changes and transitions. Furthermore, we don’t live in a vacuum, we live in a broader world and society, and we are responsible for our own careers, we can’t really do that on our own. At some point, you will need the help of others (in some cases, a lot of people) so the more you are out engaging with others in your search, the more energized you will feel.
The fact you are here and have others to work with is super valuable, I hope that’s something that you take with you, it’s hard to be a lone wolf. Think of terms of your search should be basketball and not golf.
Having a rewarding and fulfilling career is a gift and a privilege. It’s a way to contribute to the world in ways that are bigger than ourselves, but that help us find meaning and fulfillment in our lives. Above all, have fun, enjoy the ride, and be kind to other people along the way.