Career development in the 21st century
Posted: October 30, 2012 at 8:48 pm in people ~ Permalink ~ TrackBack

It’s performance review time at Google, and that means that I am reassuring the young’uns in their mid-20s that it’s all going to be fine. They have been at the top of their class their entire life, they got into the best colleges, and they plan on continuing to ace every test they’re given. And so they come to me to ask me whether they are on the right track with their career development. I have given out the same advice to several people in their mid-20s recently, so I figured I may as well share it here as well. And that advice is: Chill!

It is a ridiculous concern to be worried about being on the right career path in your mid-20s. Your career is not like the Milton Bradley Game of Life, where everybody is on the same path, and it’s a race as to who gets there first. It’s about figuring out the right path for you to achieve the results that you desire. I suppose I should stop here to caveat that I have an unconventional career path that influences my viewpoint, but so far it seems to be working for me – I keep finding interesting jobs and convincing companies to hire me.

Here is the situation in the 21st century:

  • The world is changing faster and faster. World-famous companies are appearing and disappearing in years, if not months. The old model of going to work for a company and retiring 40 years later is not realistic in this fast-changing world.

  • More possibilities for careers exist than ever before. We are not constrained in our choice of professions by what exists in the world – we can create our own professions by combining existing skill sets in new ways.
  • Because the world is changing faster and because the possibilities are growing exponentially, the one thing you can guarantee is that the skills you have today are not the skills you will need in ten years. Developing an aptitude and zest for learning will be key to staying relevant.

Unfortunately, most career development advice is still based in 20th century thinking.

  • Work your way up the career ladder.

  • Do what you have to do to get promoted, jumping through the hoops.
  • Visualize your dream job in ten years, and develop the skills to have that job.

These all assume a static world, and I just don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption. My last four jobs (three at Google) didn’t exist before I took them, so there was no way I could have planned to get those jobs in advance – they existed on no career ladder. And I think that’s the direction we’re heading, where more ad hoc positions will be created to bridge gaps in the state of things.

So how should a college grad face this new world? What does it mean to develop your career in the 21st century?

  • Always be learning (ABL?). Learning is the key to keeping up with a rapidly changing world, so developing that skill at every opportunity will put you in the best position to succeed.

  • Also, make sure that you are learning useful skills – skills at managing people, building influence, and domain-specific knowledge are transferable skills that you can keep in your toolbox, skills on how to play the politics at a dysfunctional company are not transferable.
  • When you’re in a job, solve problems and build relationships. These are often related – you don’t build relationships by schmoozing – solving people’s problems is what earns you respect and ensures that you are remembered.

So pick jobs where you are learning useful skills, and where you can have an impact and build relationships. If you do that repeatedly, you will find new positions and careers being created for you, rather than trying to climb over other people on a ladder that others built.

One other point – people early in their careers often worry that a given position is the wrong choice and that it will put them “behind”. I tell them that there are no wrong choices at that stage, as they will learn something from every position they take. Comparing themselves to peers who may be “advancing” faster is not useful since careers are no longer comparable given the multiplicity of options – we are each creating our own path.

So, yeah. Keep learning, get things done, build relationships, and then learn how to package together your unique skill set to find or create your next opportunity. That’s my advice – what do you think?

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  1. Spackle commented on October 30th, 2012 at 10:48 pm :

    You have many good points, the best of which (though not said in so many words) is that questions about career are likely the wrong questions. Better would be to ask how one wants to live. Where & how to live, with whom, and for what. Often, a good place to start is to figure out what one is taking for granted (“I want to become a master criminal, because I assume I will live a life of crime.” “I want to live in a shack in the mountains and farm gerbils.”)–and whether some questioning of those assumptions, some broader questions, are warranted.

    The conventional wisdom that traditional careers are by the bye seems reasonable, because there is a lot more job-hopping than there once was, and business has succeeded in shifting retirement risk to employees, reducing the value of staying with a particular company. Yet there remain plenty of careers and vocations for which experience and relationships lead to advancement. Examples are academia and, to choose something more specific, Bay Area water quality investigation and regulation. Rightly or not, the latter is dominated by people with decades of place- and/or field-specific experience in the issue. It’s possible to enter that field with a particular expertise, but the likelihood of advancement is limited without developing a good sense of the lay of the land, which takes time.

    As an aside, job-hopping can have negative consequences. A significant effect of term limits on California legislators is to grow the power of the paid legislative committee staff, who stick around. Legislators are now less-experienced about legislative process and history. As a result, potential solutions to certain issues are unlikely to be raised until the lead staff on that committee retires.

    Academia is challenging, in part, because much of the work is literally unthinkable without having the requisite education and time spent working through particular questions, developing relationships with appropriate interlocutors. There has been plenty of discussion on tenure vs. low-paid adjuncts and grad student assistants (the current job-hopping option within academia)–but that doesn’t preclude asking the kinds of questions you posit. It’s possible to start off working in tomato husbandry and wind up a professor of analytical philosophy…but that’ll likely be a tougher path than doing an undergrad in semiotics and a Ph.D. in philosophy or rhetoric.

    Overall, I’d suggest you point the kids in the direction of questions not about career: “Do you want to live near your parents as they age?” “What role do you see yourself playing in civic institutions?” “Do you realize acid-washed jeans were an 80s thing?” Etc. These questions should lead them back around to the more specific stuff, but hopefully in a way where they have a better sense of what they want to give and what, broadly, they hope to accomplish along the way.

  2. Eric commented on October 31st, 2012 at 8:40 am :

    Thanks for the comment, Spackle.

    While my own career and bias is towards job-hopping, I think the advice I put in this post is relevant even when staying within a single job/company/institution. When I say “Always be learning”, that can apply to developing breadth (as I have done) or depth in expertise (as you have done) – I doubt that you are doing the same things you were doing ten years ago even if you have stayed with the same institution, because I suspect the world is changing, even in the world of Bay Area water quality investigation.

    And I explicitly call out the value of building relationships, which again can apply to developing a broad network across companies or to developing a deep network within a field.

    So I stand by my advice that people should be asking themselves the questions “Am I still learning?” and “Am I still getting things done?” and if the answer to either of those two questions is “No”, they should do something about it. The response could be staying in the same job but taking on more responsibility, or it could be switching jobs, and that will depend on the field, as you say.

    You bring up a good point on the non-career aspects of life, and the choices that must be made there. I hadn’t thought about those as I’ve completely destroyed my work-life balance :) So it’s interesting that you are reading that into my post, as my advice was intended to be specifically career-focused.

  3. Eric Nehrlich commented on November 19th, 2012 at 8:27 am :

    Entertainingly, I just found my review of a Daniel Pink book, which is essentially the exact same advice. I have no new ideas.

 

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