The talent market has changed dramatically in the last few decades, but career advice has not changed along with it. Today you can wake up in New York, brew some coffee, and login to work with a team in San Francisco without even leaving your kitchen. There are far more opportunities available to candidates than ever before and the career landscape has become much more liquid. Talent has become a vast, digitally connected, and highly competitive market. To better understand how to navigate your career in this landscape, we have to examine how work has changed and why common advice hasn’t changed with it. There are three words in particular that I think sum it up well.
The first word is SECURITY.
Finding a good job out of college used to mean securing your entire future. Job security was central to how people thought of their career and it shaped the language and culture of work for a century. “A fulfilling career with a great organization” is a sentence that somehow still sounds ordinary today, yet it should feel very foreign to a modern professional because today a fulfilling career spans multiple organizations, not just one.
Today, everything is moving. Very few people accept a job offer expecting to be with the same company ten years later, especially in the tech industry. Yet young professionals are still often told they don’t want to seem “jumpy” and they should prioritize consistency in their career. This is the language of an outdated mental model for career building.
The old concept of career building was centered around longevity with one organization. The reality today is that movement early in your career can be incredibly beneficial. In a landscape that is constantly moving, it is far better to start a career with diverse experience in multiple environments. When you reach your growth ceiling at one place, take the experience you’ve earned somewhere else that can give you a higher ceiling to reach for and repeat. Eventually, when you are ready for management or specialization as an IC, your diverse experience will add far more value to your next employer. In the past, security meant tenure and pension. Today, security means having options and the modern young professional should be leveraging their options and diversifying their experience early on.
The second word is GROWTH.
Not too long ago, growth, like security, was anchored to tenure. Pay increases were awarded in small doses and were spaced across large gaps of time. Promotions came after a set amount of time rather than achievement. The market was not as liquid back then and changing companies often meant stepping backward in your career, not forward, yet another reason people stayed in place. Slow internal growth is largely still the reality at most organizations. It is another lingering artifact of outdated workforce psychology. Employers still have a hard time justifying sizable raises to current employees despite the tremendous costs of recruiting outside talent but since the meaning of security has changed, it has pushed employees to embrace their options on the market. Individual growth has become catalyzed by career movement and the rewards of loyalty pale in comparison.
At-will employment today is a mutually insecure relationship to enter into. When an employee can be terminated at any moment for reasons as elusive as “we’re taking a new direction”, it would be foolish to put loyalty over their own growth and needs. From Forbes to Fast Company, the data show that those who change jobs every two years early on in their career end up earning over 50% more in the long run compared to those who stay put to grow internally. In a world where everything is moving, movement is the key to fast growth. Especially early on in a career.
The third word is STRUCTURE.
In an attempt to better innovate at scale, many tech and other rapid-growth organizations try to shed the hierarchical scaffolding of the premodern workplace and flat work structures are filling the void. A flat work structure is one in which titles are less meaningful and theoretically anyone is empowered to contribute ideas or solve problems. This is a gold mine for growth if you’re curious and driven. In the right environment, a flat work structure gives you closer proximity to leaders, more of a voice on any team, and more opportunity to reach out and solve problems - meaning more opportunity to add lucrative experience to your resume. When I worked at Flywire, Mike Massaro used to say “working in a rapid growth company is better than any master’s degree” and he was absolutely right. Seek the right environments that offer autonomy and a flat work culture and the growth you can achieve will be exponential.
This fundamental change to the meaning of security, growth, and structure in a career has transformed the talent market into what it is today. It is liquid like any other market and as long as a young professional is adding value and solving problems in each role they take on, they should embrace movement early in their career. Bigger problems take more time to solve, so longer tenure in each role will naturally occur later on in a career at the manager or director level and beyond. You won’t be “jumpy” for long.
This article was written by Taylor Roa, Director of Talent at Wistia.