From our first professional aspirations as teenagers, to starting out in the “real world” in our early 20’s, to a long-winded career always chasing “the next thing,” we have a certain idea drilled into our heads.
Our careers are modeled as a path.
We’re told to select a major or a field of study because it controls the opportunities available to us in the real world. Once we find our industry focus, we search for others who model the success we want for ourselves. We try to replicate their path. Inevitably it doesn’t work, and we flounder through the next few years trying to find a new path to some mythical professional promised land.
Throughout this stretch of time, our priorities change. We find people who have totally different priorities than ourselves. We see their paths through life, soak in all the advice we can, memorize the steps to success, and go forth with a compelling visualization of what’s to come.
Sooner or later, we arrive at a sobering realization: no one else’s career path will work for ourselves, and we must forge our own path. For some, this is modeled like the tesseract from Interstellar. We hop from one path to the next, taking little pieces from each and attempting to find our way out of that insatiable black hole we try to fill.
For anyone who is a Millennial or an elder member of Gen Z, you’ve likely experienced something similar. I have, too. Between switching majors from computer science to marketing midway through college, and then working in three incredibly-different industries on the brand and agency side, I’ve seen a lot in my young career.
Contrast that with my parents. I’ve taken full-time work engagements at the same number of companies at 28 as my parents, both 60, have — combined.
And yet I think there’s the possibility of a different type of career model that fits all three of our careers.
Before determining a model that fits the modern worker’s career, let’s dissect the construction of the career path and why that model is ingrained in the heads of hundreds of millions of workers.
Segmenting into Your Career Path
Let’s start from this definition:
A career path is a smaller group of jobs within a career cluster that use similar skills. Each career cluster contains several career paths. You can start in a [lower-level] job in a career path and, with more education and experience, move up within that path.
Here we have a career path defined as finding a career cluster — likely through education and entry-level roles — and then advancing on your line within that cluster. The end goal? Seemingly, it’s reaching the pinnacle of career progress within your cluster. That comes with a level of financial security, a position as a trusted leader and mentor, and perhaps some public renown within your network.
Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers coming of age in the economy of a post-World War II United States were driven to work incredibly hard and build a variety of skills that kept them employable. Because of the consolidation of many large corporations and the societal leveling of the playing field during and following World War II, that reduced the number of opportunities for lateral career movement. Paul Graham has an essay that details this period of consolidation in depth.
This was the goal for many people in these generations where careers were literally one path: working with one company or a small number of companies and building up familial stability throughout their working careers, culminating in a peaceful retirement.
Interruption is Inevitable
But wait! What about those who have had their linear progression altered, by choice or by the world’s impact on their work?
Your career path includes the jobs you’ll need to hit your ultimate career goal, but it doesn’t need to follow a straight line. There’s no blueprint or timetable for climbing the career ladder.
Career paths traditionally imply vertical growth or advancement to higher-level positions, but they can also include lateral (sideways) movement within or across industries.
Now we’re introduced to the idea that a career path isn’t necessarily linear with set stages. This accounts for the mid-life crisis, the economic declines that wipe jobs from the global workforce, the employee who wants to break off on their own entrepreneurial venture, and those of us who just decide, “Hey, I like this, but I want to use my skills and try something different.”
These events have an incredible impact on a person at any career stage. What we can’t forget in any of those moments are the aspects of life outside our careers impacted by such an interruption: our well-being, our financial security, our happiness, and the same for others in our lives. A career may be 40 hours a week, or it may be 60 hours a week or even more, but it has an impact on other aspects of life, and vice versa.
And through all this, our career path is still tied to career goals at the end, separate from the rest of our lives.
Reorienting the Career Path
Since the impacts of our careers aren’t just isolated to our work, we need to look outside the narrow career path. What happens when we consider changes in the career path? How are new and relevant skills acquired? What about our interests? Our personalities? Our core values?
What about all of these aspects which relate to our whole humanity?
While this information is outside of a professional context, creating a list of activities you like can help you focus a career search. For example, you may enjoy a career in cybersecurity if you enjoy logic puzzles, or you may enjoy a traveling sales role if you like meeting new people.
Identifying your core values can help you focus on [a] career you find personally fulfilling. It can also help you find fields or niche areas that you are passionate about. Consider making a list of qualities you think are important in a company or its employees. You can use this list to search for companies and job descriptions that share these values.
Finding a New North Star
Now we’re getting somewhere! Let’s bring it home, because we’ve discovered that the career path model offers us some flexibility, so we can find a job within a career cluster that aligns better with our interests and core values.
What if our very happiness and mental well-being is at stake in our career path? What if we’ve found ourselves on a career path that leads to a very different reality from what we expected? What to do then?
Since so much of our time is spent either at work, traveling to and from work, or thinking about work, it inevitably plays a huge role in our lives. If you feel bored or unsatisfied with how you spend large parts of the day, it can take a serious toll on your physical and mental health. You may feel burned out and frustrated, anxious, depressed, or unable to enjoy time at home knowing that another workday lies ahead.
Here’s where our career path unravels completely. Even if it isn’t a straight line, and it offers some flexibility in a general career direction, the model doesn’t fit if we don’t continue making forward progress towards a career goal. There are two inherent opportunities here for burnout: pushing forward to a career goal that doesn’t satisfy us or make us happy, or giving in entirely, succumbing to the loss of direction and staying put.
And now for the turn:
What if the central goal of our career isn’t career-centered?
What if it was centered on our personal happiness?
*ENTER GARYVEE*
What if we all built careers where we used the skills we’re most passionate about, where we can stay physically and mentally healthy, where we can build enough personal equity to support our individual lifestyles, and where we build meaningful relationships?
What if we combined all that to derive personal happiness from our careers, and enjoy the products of that process?
Career Paths are No Longer Necessary
A 21st century career like this is possible because of reduced barriers to entry, deep networks that intimately connect everyone from college grads to CEO’s, and the aspiration of industries that root out deep-seeded inequities to build inclusive environments.
The old-fashioned promise of the career path was oriented towards growing in your profession to sustain life and liberty. We now have the opportunity to redefine the professional model so it welcomes the pursuit of happiness into the center of that equation as well.
That’s the type of career I want to build.
And it’s not built on a straight-line path.
