Saturday, January 6, 2024

4 Career Mistakes I Made That You Should Not

I joined the workforce just over a decade ago. In 2012, I “began my career”, whatever that means. Three years as a business journalist with Forbes, two as a Yale teaching assistant, three more as a reporter with Power Finance & Risk, and the last three as a marketer & researcher with RMI. Overall I think I’ve done OK: I get paid to live where I like and do what I love. 2012 me would gladly accept 2024 me. And yet I’ve made some poor decisions that have set me back, slowed me down, or limited my options. Here are four career mistakes I made that you may want to avoid.

1.      1. Conversational in several foreign languages, “business fluent” in none

This first one is a no-brainer. I learned French in school for nine years and got pretty good by the time I’d graduated high school. Instead of continuing it at university in England, I gave it up. Perhaps worse still, when I suddenly found myself doing a study abroad year outside Berlin, I studied German twice a week and tried to speak the language to locals as much as I could. I’d accidentally use French grammar in my German classes, but I picked up basic German quickly. On that study abroad year in Germany, I also tried to do informal weekly language exchanges with Spanish and Polish students. Despite having multiple languages floating around in my head, I left Germany able to carry a conversation at a Kreuzberg beerhall. I continued studying German, albeit halfheartedly in my final year of university in England. Then I forgot about German for three years. Then I spoke and studied it again for a year as part of my Masters program requirements and haven’t touched it since. Last year I took a beginner’s Spanish class in New York but again, my interest has waned because I haven’t found friends to practise it with. I like learning languages, not mastering them.

The result is that I can talk to taxi drivers, McDonalds cashiers, and confused tourists in Hindi, French, German and Spanish. I can even discern a newspaper headline here and there. But I can’t use any of those languages to further my career. It feels like effort wasted. I can’t write memos in any foreign language nor negotiate a commercial contract. I should have stuck to French—the language I’d invested nearly a decade learning—and taken it to full, “business fluency”. Le subjonctif be damned. I should have deepened my language skills, not broadened them. French fluency could have opened up a life in France or Europe more broadly. I wish someone had told me at 19 to do study abroad in France, so I’d have learned to love French culture and make French friends—two parts of my study abroad year in Germany that endeared German to me. In foreign language, perhaps more than any other professional skill sets, the world values specialists rather than generalists.

2.     2. Picked the wrong monetizable skills

Speaking of specialization, I think I sadly picked the wrong skills to develop all the way to “monetizability”. My most monetizable skills, I’d posit, are research and writing. Those are things I can do better than a competent, educated generalist and better (for now) than a machine. But, tragically, they are skills that few employers want to pay for and those that do, pay towards the bottom end of the salary spectrum. Media & communications, NGOs, government, maybe some consulting. Beyond that, there aren’t really research and writing careers. I should have picked different, more monetizable skills and acquired the credentials to monetize them. No one really wants to pay for good writing. Writing doesn’t make businesses money any more.

If you want to work in finance, you probably need an MBA and/or a CFA—not to mention securities licenses—to signal your monetizable skills: financial modeling, contract negotiations, closing deals. Doctors specialize early with medical degrees and so on. Lawyers have to pass the bar. Project developers—whether it’s real estate, energy, or infrastructure—build and showcase their project management skills by pointing to steel in the ground somewhere. Accounting firms hire accountants, tech giants hire coders. People who specialize to acquire discrete, monetizable skills get placed into high-paying, stable careers. I guess being a generalist, on the other hand, is more fun and intellectually stimulating. I did my Global Affairs Masters degree—a generalist degree if ever there was one—because I got a scholarship from Yale and I had to stay in journalism after I graduated because it’s the only job I could get a US work visa for. I’m only now starting to build different, more monetizable skills like people management and fund-raising; I should have begun this process years ago. Indeed, it’ll be years till I have achievements to show on those fronts.

3.      3. Applied for jobs when I was stressed

A colleague once told me never to change jobs simply to leave an employer, but rather to go toward something exciting, worthy, better. Twice in the same summer, I forgot that advice. I wanted to leave my job at the time because I was stressed and over-worked. Both prospective jobs were different to what I was doing at the time, meaning I’d need to prepare extra hard for the interviews. In practice, though, I didn’t really have the mind-space to pass those grueling job interview processes. In fact, I messed up two promising final round interviews because I was so stressed and frayed that, in one instance, I misread the final assignment prompt and, in the other, I submitted a simple writing exercise with a glaring, unforgiveable typo.

I felt so ashamed right after I'd hit submit. The one thing I’d been trained to do was read prompts, interpret briefs, write well, and edit better. I’d back myself to do that better than most. But now for both job interview processes, which happened months apart, I did the writing assignments late on weeknights or through my weekends, short of mental, physical, and emotional rest. I’d rushed through them, making simple mistakes. I wasn’t fully present when I was at work, nor when I was at home doing the assignments; when I was at work during the day, I was thinking about what I’d write in the assignment that evening or weekend – and vice versa. In truth, my day job wasn’t that bad, I simply hadn’t put in the effort to remedy it. I was eventually much happier at work just weeks later. Those two sets of job rejections were medicine: bitter and necessary.

4.      4. Comparing myself to others

This last one I need to get tattooed on my forehead so I never forget it. I habitually compare the weakest aspect of my job/career the strongest aspects of my closest friends’. For example, my best friends from grad school are now directors at tech giants, associate partners at consultancies, VPs at global financial institutions, making probably twice what I do, managing entire teams, bringing in millions or budgeting even more. Comparing myself to them is human nature and folly – a surefire way to diminish many of one’s own achievements while ignoring other wins altogether. Most importantly, what your friends do or earn also... doesn’t matter. They are operating within very different constraints—not my immigration & visa handicap, for one. They are older. They have different stressors and working hours. But even that does not actually matter.

I’ve found the best approach for a chronic seeker of self-development like me is to compare myself to where I was a year ago. Or better yet, where I was yesterday. That exercise surfaces so many of my own achievements (big and small). That’s the stuff that matters because that’s what you can control. That’s where to focus. I ended 2023 with an unimaginable new array of knowledge, accomplishments, networks, and competencies compared to where I’d begun it. And now I know what I need to do in 2024. As long as “last year you” is proud of “this year you” and “yesterday you” is proud of “today you”, you’re doing fine.

Conclusion

By the way, there were also some other things which didn’t go as planned, but I wouldn’t call those mistakes per se. I had no control over them. For example, I picked the wrong countries to try to emigrate to: first the UK and now the US both have disastrous immigration systems offering me little near-term hope for stability, never mind residency. I should have moved to Canada and gotten permanent residency like many friend, but I’m now too many years invested in America to ponder leaving for anything other than the “job of a lifetime” elsewhere. Another example is doing my grad school summer internship with an awesome little start-up that couldn’t offer me a full-time role upon graduation, rather than biting the bullet and getting a corporate internship that would almost guarantee a cookie-cutter, well-paying career eventually. I made those decisions with the best information I had available at the time, so I’d call those fair decisions with bad outcomes rather than mistakes.

So, to the students who reach out on LinkedIn for career advice every week: please make notes. To my friends and colleagues who’ve learned from their owns mistakes along the way, please share your wisdom and experiences too. I think career mistakes that teach you things are bitter medicine but medicine nonetheless. What medicine will the next decade of work hold? Nothing tattoo-worthy I hope.

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