🥇 'Winning' your career
Next week is our “Leaping the waterfall’ Q&A on switching from journalism to tech. I hope you can join us!
It’s not just you. Nearly everyone is struggling to make sense of what professional success looks like today.
In “How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World,” New York Times senior economic correspondent Neil Irwin lays out the reality of today’s fluid marketplace. For professionals in nearly every sector, he says, “what it means to do a job well and have a successful career is changing faster than most people’s understanding of how to navigate it.”
While once only senior leaders needed to watch for economic shifts, Irwin notes in the first decades of the 21st century this became necessary for low- to mid-level professionals as well. At the same time:
- changes in how companies are structured mean promotions are fewer and farther between. In other words, it’s taking longer for people to move up the hierarchy.
- the old expectation that you could land a job at one place and work your way up until you retired with a gold watch is gone.
Now it’s sensible, Irwin writes, “to make sure your degree of loyalty to the company is correctly aligned with the company’s degree of loyalty to you.” We can think of these as the currents at play, and we’re better served to spot them ahead of time than get carried away unawares.
Here are a few key takeaways from Irwin’s book that apply directly to the career river approach: