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Key points
- In the past, companies supported their employees' career paths over decades.
- People now change jobs frequently, so managing your professional development is critical.
- Having a strategy and network is critical to building a career path you can control.
For many years, the average employee spent the majority of their career with one employer. They could expect full healthcare benefits for themselves and their families, a couple of weeks of paid vacation—and, most importantly—job security. People joined a company out of high school or college and, in many cases, remained with that company until they retired. The social contract between employer and employee was mostly a two-way street: The employee was loyal to the business, and the company provided stability long-term. For employees, that meant the traditional commitment of showing up at the workplace on time, being as productive as possible, and working to fulfill the company mission. For employers, that meant giving their team members both long-term job security as well as professional development and promotion. The job itself created the career path.
Today, that social contract has been broken by both sides: Companies rarely offer pensions, and they no longer invest in employees’ careers with the mindset that the relationship will last 20, 30, or even 40 years. Meanwhile, employees see each job as an opportunity to find the next opportunity. That’s not wrong; it’s today’s business reality. But it can become incredibly nerve-wracking. How do you plan your career path while navigating through multiple employers?
You can build confidence in your career path even if job security is a thing of the past. Here’s how.
Build a network. While gaining experience will help you get better jobs and increase your pay, building a network is key to your long-term career prospects. After all, you can’t improve your skills if you can’t get hired, and your network will always remain one of your strongest resources for finding jobs. Whether you’re a recent grad relying on an alumni group or an experienced professional using a headhunter firm, you will find that you need a network to help you find job opportunities, connect with mentors, and even provide future employees for your own team. Think of your network as your long-term employer: the source of professional development and new opportunities.
Keep learning. Early in your career, you’ll want to keep expanding your know-how naturally, just in order to do your job well and feel confident. But it’s key to keep learning as you get more experienced. That might be additional formal education or learning online. It could even include informal interactions with your network. But the point is that you’ll feel more confident about your career path if you keep challenging yourself, learn about new trends, and understand where the conversation is headed. You don’t need to try to be an expert in every new concept. But you want to build an attitude that makes you less afraid of new ideas. When you’re young, it feels like everything that’s new is easy to adapt to your habits or mindset. Eventually, you build habits and preferences and find them harder to abandon. Change gets harder—not because your mind can’t learn new things as you get older but because we resist change generally. The longer something has worked well for us, the harder it becomes to abandon it.
Become self-aware (it’s not all about you). Job changes are more common than they used to be, but our emotional reaction to change hasn’t evolved as fast as the market has. The social contract that used to exist between employers and employees aligned with our basic instinct for stability. Humans find safety in routine. Losing your job, or even proactively deciding to leave, is inherently stressful. It’s a change of livelihood, social life, daily habits, and even our identity. Thirty or forty years ago, we only changed jobs once or twice in our lifetime. But now, the average length of time at any one job is about four years, according to the Department of Labor. That’s as many as 10 jobs over the course of a 40-year career. And yet, we must detach as much as possible from feeling a personal judgment when it happens. Economies ebb and flow, and companies go through reductions in force (RIFs) in order to survive until the next uptick. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or even a poor performer. You simply were not essential to that company at that moment. As difficult as it is, long-term career planning in today’s age means planning not to have job security. So, being resilient will be incredibly important.
The most important aspect of protecting your career path for the long term is to have a plan.
The famous quote from Alice in Wonderland is a useful guide: “If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take.” You need to know where you want to go. You don’t have to understand how you’re going to get there fully, but you do need to plan (and tweak as you go). It’s a bit like one long road trip. You’re headed out of Boston to San Diego. There’s a lot of different ways to make that trek. But you have to decide, at least, that you want to be somewhere in Southern California. People make big changes in their career path: starting as an actor, deciding to go into sales, and leaving to start their own coffee bar. San Diego, to use the road trip metaphor, isn’t the job title; it’s the destination. Do you want to be in a position where your passion is profitable? Do you want your job to be something you leave behind each evening to focus on priorities like family and friends? Do you want to afford a certain type of lifestyle, or is freedom and flexibility more important? The earlier you know what a career means to you, the better you can build a career path that gets you where you want to go.
