How to boost your career in a ruthless job market
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Modern jobs come with a tour of duty expectation — that is, you provide a certain commitment to the employer, and the employer provides a certain commitment to you, but it's not forever. After a few years, results and options are re-evaluated.
Rather than thinking of a career ladder, it's more important in the modern job market to view it as a career lattice — a grid. It's not always about moving up, sometimes it's about moving sideways or even down slightly. Why? That way you can cut across different specialties and see how they fit together.
One of the most important aspects about working at a company isn't just the money you are paid — it's about the experiences they give you and how they set you up for the future. On top of getting a raise, you should be mindful how an employer is trying to help you expand your horizons so that you can rise to the top of the lattice.
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NEIL IRWIN
Neil Irwin is a senior economic correspondent at The New York Times, where he was a founding member of The Upshot, the Times’s site for analytical journalism. He was previously the author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, a New York Times bestselling account of the global financial crisis and its aftermath that was short-listed for the McKinsey-Financial Times Business Book of the Year award.
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TRANSCRIPT:
NEIL IRWIN: The idea of a tour of duty is a concept that's existed for a long time in the military and the diplomatic world. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, first applied it to the corporate world. And I think it's a really useful concept. The idea is, when you sign up for job, you're not turning up for some indefinite term of service. You're not going to do the same job for 20, 25 years. What you're saying is, "I'm going to do this job and take on this project that might take two years, three years, however long it may be, and after that, we'll re-evaluate." And you're providing a certain commitment to the employer, the employer is providing a certain commitment to you. It's not forever, though.
And it's kind of being honest about the fact that jobs aren't forever. I tend to think of it as what I call the three-year itch, building on the tour of duty concept. First year, you start a new job, you're just trying to learn the ropes, figure out how to do it well. Second year, you're hitting your stride, you're doing well. By the third year, you have to train yourself to have this three-year itch, start to look around and say, how can I explore the next option? It doesn't necessarily mean changing employers. It doesn't even necessarily mean changing jobs. It's saying, "O.K., three, maybe four or five years has passed, I really need to make sure I'm broadening my experience and gaining something other than just doing the same job over and over again." So I think I grew up hearing the term career ladder. And I think it's something we've all heard.
You start in a job, you start as a junior associate or whatever the title is, and you work your way up to associate, to director, to vice president, to whatever your ambitions may be. And that's fine. There's certainly those hierarchies that still exist in most companies. But what I've found is that it's really important to think of it as not just a ladder, but a lattice, so a grid. And it's not just about moving up, it's also about moving sideways, sometimes even moving down slightly. I think the key is cutting across different types of technical specialty and understand how they fit together. It's not just about, if you're a marketing, person becoming the very best marketing person. It's becoming the very best marketing person who also understands the technology, the engineering, the finance, the strategy, how those pieces fit together in a modern organization. If you can't do that, you're not even that good a marketing person.
You're not going to get to that top rung because you haven't made those lateral moves and understood how the pieces fit together. So the best thing about being new into the workforce, new into the corporate world, is that you have a lot of room to grow, and you're not so established that you can't really jump around. And the thing about becoming more senior is those sideways leaps on the career ladder are a lot riskier and a lot more dangerous. If you fall down, it's going to hurt a lot more. When you're at lower levels, it's actually less of a r...
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