I spent the first half of my career making a big, and I would expect, very common mistake. I believed that if I worked hard, developed my skills in my spare time, and became good at my job, that my career would progress.
This idea made so much sense at the time that I never really questioned the logic of it. It wasn’t until years later, after I had become good at my job but my career still hadn’t progressed to where I expected that I started to question the wisdom of my plan.
It turns out it wasn’t a plan at all. As I like to say, hope is not a strategy, and that’s exactly what I had been counting on to deliver me the career of my dreams: hope. A plan has a goal, milestones that can be used to measure progress towards that goal, and actionable steps to achieve them. I had none of that. I just thought that if I worked hard, I would get what I wanted, even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.
Finally, after realizing that career advancement isn’t just a thing that happens to those who work hard, I started to put together a plan.
Goal
My plan started with analyzing my strengths and weaknesses. I wanted to aim for something that would accentuate the former while minimizing the latter. This required some soul-searching, and a good, hard look in the mirror to come up with some harsh truths about what I was good at and what I wasn’t.
I had known for some time that I was a good programmer, but that there were those who were much better than I would ever be. Software development just made sense to these people as naturally as breathing, and they were not people I wanted to compete with.
At the same time I realized that what these savants usually lacked was the ability to communicate their complex technical ideas/problems/solutions in a way that non-technical people could understand. I recognized more and more that a brilliant idea, improperly communicated to decision makers, was likely to get ignored, and was therefore useless.
This was an area I excelled in. I could be the conduit between the genius software engineers and the business savvy leadership, translating each group’s needs into ideas the other group could understand and act upon. My goal became to join IT management.
Milestones
How to make this happen? I had been a software engineer for quite some time, and I was successful enough at it that my managers wanted me to keep doing it. How to make the leap to management when all everyone wants you to do is individual contribution?
I decided that my first milestone would be to get an MBA. The decision to get a business degree was as much about signalling the seriousness of my intentions as much as it was about anything I’d learn in the program. Business school was an extreme challenge, but given how hard it had been for me to take the next step in my career I thought that a grand gesture was necessary.
After graduating from business school a few years later, my next milestone would be to find a job where my primary role was not to write code. This would allow me the time and freedom to leverage my new business degree and demonstrate the strengths that I identified during my earlier soul-searching session.
My last milestone would be to finally move into a position where no coding was expected at all. This move would signify the achievement of my years long goal, and allow me to be leverage my strengths to their best advantage.
Own Your Career
I’m happy to say that this move happened almost a year ago, and I’m very happily in a role where I believe I bring far more value than I ever did as a developer. And now that I’ve achieved this goal that I set for myself almost a decade ago, I’ve had a moment to reflect on how it didn’t just happen to me. It was the result of deliberate planning, hard work, and honest conversations with myself.
If you’re waiting for someone else to advocate for your career, if you expect to achieve your goals without having really articulated them, if you are not taking deliberate, concrete actions to get what you want, then you’re renting your career instead of owning it.
Renting your career means ceding control to others who certainly don’t have the same intentions for your career that you do. Renting your career means working hard, but not seeing the desired results because all of your effort isn’t part of a coherent plan.
Renting your career is hope as a strategy, and unless you make the decision to own your career, you’ll always be used by others to accomplish their goals instead of yours. It isn’t quick or easy, but if you pick your nose up from the grindstone for long enough to figure out what you really want and how to get it, it can be done. Best of luck!
