You Cannot Plan Your Entire Career

When I meet new clients or speak at a conference I always make sure to briefly describe my background so people understand my perspective better (and so they know I’ve had a solid mix of education and experience). More than half the time someone mentions that I have had a pretty unusual career.

Yes. Yes I have.

In addition to my transitions from military officer to professor to consultant to entrepreneur, the career evolution within each of those (especially in the military, where I started as a nuclear operations officer and finished up in a humanitarian assistance role) shows a similar inconsistency. The fact that I have had such a winding career path that rarely had clearly identified waypoints tells me that it can hard to truly plan your career in a way that gets you to one particularly coveted position. Perhaps the best you can do is set yourself up for great opportunities, because you never know…something even better than your first option might come up.

Your industry, and your specific organization, can change a lot, and can change quickly. The job you aim to have in 15 years, or maybe even only 5 years, may not even exist by the time you get there. Meanwhile, new opportunities may have been created, and you need to figure out how ready you are for them. Perhaps the best approach to career planning that I have seen is to focus on your broader career rather than on any one specific job, by gaining transferrable knowledge and building your network.

I’ve been following both these ideas my entire career, and they have worked pretty well. When it comes to gaining knowledge that can be used across the spectrum of work, what we are really talking about is keeping yourself ready for opportunities. The better prepared you are for a variety of options, the greater the number of options that will be available to you. This means not only getting formal education and certifications, but also trying to work in a range of specialities so you are not limiting yourself by having experience in only one area. As a leader you need a broad, enterprise-wide vision, and you set yourself up for that opportunity by getting that exposure early on.

Networking is important too, and I don’t just mean sucking up to people, collecting business cards, and having 500+ connections on LinkedIn. Build a network that you can use for information, not just for job hunting. Reach out to that network when you need to know about new markets, or product ideas, or different organizational structures. This might be a network inside your company, but more and more people are recognizing the usefulness of external networks, and companies are starting to realize this too. When a new opportunity comes up, the person who is able to fill in the gaps in their knowledge quickest or show up with some good ideas from the start is the one most likely to get the job.

It’s hard to have a definitive map for your career; perhaps the best you can do is have a travel guide filled with lots of different options. You can identify the direction in which you want to go, and then set yourself up for success by building your overall talent rather than zeroing in on just one spot.

Your career will always be changing. Will you be ready for the new challenges as well as the new opportunities?