Credible Career Steps - An Investment Approach

A career is a sequential of jobs that - when you place them one after the other - show a path that leads to some direction. The investment parallel (for some an inappropriate metaphor these days) may help to face and plan your career path.

Most often the planned direction is a level of money involved; first jobs little money, the next more and more, etc.. Another way to portrait a career path is from little depth of knowledge (and experience) to more and more leading to a virtual mountain of expertise and experience.

Then there are paths where there is a break in the style; one career is followed by another of a complete different characteristic. This is for example where an engineer becomes a salesman. Starting in the area of pre-sales or conductive sales and climbing towards sales management. This makes sense as the sales experience helps to elaborate communication skills that are required for (senior) management roles. One problem of this career path is, and this is true for many of these paths, that it is a one-way-street. After three years of sales experience, the engineering profession and the engineering techniques change so rapidly that the engineer would have to invest too much time to reenter the engineering market. Then credibility becomes an issue. Once leaving the engineering world, the culture of sales is quite different and returning would be hard, and found to be incredible.

With growth into management positions credibility is also an issue. Companies can grow very fast and did so over the last few years, but those who change from a specific area of expertise towards a more general and wider knowledge and skills area will face the problem of the one-way (career) street.

Credible are those paths where more debt (in knowledge and experience) is achieved or where more broad, general and less specific knowledge and skills are required, like that for management.

A third factor influencing the credibility of a path is where the experience is gathered. Is it in an all-in-one (company) or spread over different companies and jobs. If you have managed to climb the career-ladder within one company than you face a big risk especially once you have reached the management level.

Careers are like investments; too much revenue at once (one step) may be accompanied with too much risk. A safe career investment approach is one where the steps are moderate, OR at least where all subsequent steps fit your (investment) style.

By Hans Bool