Career Progression Isn't a CLASSROOM – It's a MARKETPLACE
Most people reading this newsletter spent almost 20 years being very good students.
And after you left school, many of you went to “professional finishing school”-type jobs like banking, consulting, or a leadership development program within a large company.
These jobs are a great transition into the working world. They give you a systematic rotation of projects, clear criteria for evaluation, frequent feedback, and a structured path for progression.
In many ways, they are like classrooms set up in the working world.
You’re a bright-eyed newbie just here to learn.
Someone else sets up the success criteria for you.
You get busy working hard to meet it, through a series of structured assignments that are handed to you one-by-one.
You always know how well you’re doing — compared to the objective grading criteria and compared to your classmates.
But at some point, my friends, the training wheels come off.
When you’ve gained enough skills and perspective, and the rotational, “I’m just learning and exploring!” phase of your career is over…
Career progression stops being a classroom and becomes a MARKETPLACE.
You have skills and expertise to bring to the table. Your main goal isn’t to prove yourself — you’ve already cleared that bar. Now you’re here to move things forward and solve the problems that need solving.
You have to define your own success criteria. People will be happy to make up criteria for you. But what are YOU solving for? Where are you trying to go? How will you know if you’re making progress or not?
You can create your own opportunities. Sure, you can look at job boards. You can also propose roles that never existed, or shape an existing role to be more to your liking. All you have to do is see a gap and sell someone on you, your skillset, and the problem that needs solving.
Comparison is meaningless. Who’s doing better — the CEO of a three-person startup or the Sr. Manager running a twenty-person team? The person promoted every two years working 80 hours a week, or the person promoted every seven years with a thriving personal life? These questions don’t even make sense because everyone is solving for different things.
Carrying classroom thinking to a marketplace environment is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
You’re going to be fully at the mercy of people selling you THEIR agenda and THEIR priorities without ever developing your own.
If you want clarity around where you’re trying to go, and why…
Confidence in your ability to craft your own opportunities and deliver on what you promise…
And the sense that you’re on top of it, making good progress toward the life you want, at the pace you want to be going…
You have to stop waiting for a boss or an interviewer or a job description to hand it to you.
The classroom days are over. No one else is in charge of your progression anymore.
The marketplace is more interested in what you can do for IT than in making you feel good about yourself. (And that not because it’s mean or malicious! That’s just how marketplaces work.)
You’ve excelled as a student for a very long time. You already know how to work hard, learn fast, and make the most of what you’re given.
Now you just need to tweak those skills a little bit and learn how to use them to make you just as successful at creating the life you want.
And that is exactly what I help my clients do.
Get clear on what you want — put away those external standards and build your own internal compass, based on YOUR values, interests, skills, and priorities.
Figure out how to get it — even in the face of unknowns, uncertainty, rejection, and ambiguity.
Work toward it every day and ENJOY the process — instead of fueling yourself with anxiety and never quite feeling like you’ve done enough.
You already have the skills, qualifications, and work ethic.
You’ve already done the hard part.
Now all you have to do is learn how to set your own course and have fun sailing it.
Let me teach you how.
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