Career Growth: Cracking the Code to Pave Your Own Path

In my 12+ years of experience and having built my own startup (TravelTriangle) from a few people to 900+ people team, I got a chance to closely work with a variety of people across different fields and at a different stage of their career ranging from the ones who were just starting their career to even quite experienced leaders. Also as a part of our culture of building future leaders & long-term sustainable org at TravelTriangle, we have been continuously grooming/mentoring people to step up in their career and keep up their growth path matched with the pace of the growth of the company.

In all this, I could see that most people were in a constant dilemma of what exists next for them in the professional field. For some, the dilemma was around if it would be exciting enough for them to keep them motivated for long while for others who were aware of their future path, it's about things to do or skills to acquire so as to cope up with future needs. This is still the case when I see in other startups as well as my new company. In the former case, they go into exploring the alternate fields and hence not able to focus/explore more things within their field, and in case of the latter dilemma, they sometimes go too deep into making existing/known skills better & better while missing other skillsets to acquire in the process.

From my first-hand experience, I could see a pattern in the growth path for people in general as well as in more-depth around engineering, product & analytics functions. I have seen people growing all the way up from the entry or a bit senior profile to executive leaders in not just mine but other startups too. While it was all because of their hunger, passion & potential, every one of them had a mentor/leader guiding and pushing them all the way up as well as preparing them for what's next. I hope this article helps to open some awareness for some and further helps them to see what's ahead in their professional growth and accordingly choose the right trajectory for themselves.

Choosing your own path

The first thing everyone has to do or at least should definitely try to find out his/her interest as well as if they can become skilled enough to be able to contribute right in that field. This would be the most apt discovery of your life and once identified, you would actually start loving what you do and hence not feeling anymore like work. However if after giving due time and effort, you are finding it hard to acquire skills in the area of your interest, I'd say you can keep pursuing it as a hobby and maybe try to grow some interest in the field where you feel yourself to be skilled enough. Below 2x2 matrix can help you identify or narrow things in this direction:

Type of Growth

Every person mostly grows in the below-mentioned ways in their professional career.

1) Efficiency growth - Doing more of similar kind of things but faster & with better quality. This aspect of growth is short-lived and saturates quite faster in terms of learning and challenges.

2) Lattice or Lateral growth - This is where you can explore which area or function interests you most. This can happen within the same function or across functions. Helps you broaden your perspective, acquire more generic skillsets. However, this would also mean that you have to start afresh or at a different level and at times leaving your subject matter expertise or most of your experience in the respective field behind.

One of the ways possible is by transitioning in the same company, however, it is not that easily available everywhere and mostly seen in growing or grown startups only while few big corporates too, being exceptions here. Few examples - QA person moving to project manager role; analyst person moving to either product or strategy role(s); product person moving to business and/or strategy role(s); engineering person moving to a product role; sales person moving to a marketing role, etc.

Another way people do it is by acquiring a college degree/diploma/certification in the new field and using that theoretical learning to get a foot in the door. Few examples - Doing MBA to shift from IC to a management role; MS in a specific field to join as an expert in that field; marketing certifications to shift to a marketing role.

3) Specialist growth - While undertaking the same or similar responsibilities, you go deeper into certain aspects of the function to become a subject matter expert or you get to experience & upskill yourself to handle a variety of projects.

4) Vertical Growth - Jumping the ladder up while taking up more responsibilities and widening your horizon. This growth is mostly aligned with a path to becoming a leader and able to steer an organization while working from outside and having quite an abstract top-down view.

Growth Journey in General

In case you want are interest in multiple fields or feel that your skillset is more generic and suited for multiple functions (s), lateral growth would be more suited to you. However, while you might still be creating a lot of value for yourself and the company, it would be difficult to pursue specialist and/or vertical growth along with. On the other hand, if you have chosen vertical growth in your respective field, lateral growth becomes more and more difficult as you progress further up in the ladder, though you can still pick up specialist growth along with.

Anyway, all kinds of growth are good to pursue depending on your interest as well as your skillsets & in the end whatever makes you happy. Sometimes people move laterally at the beginning of their career, try exploring their true interest, and once found, they stick to it moving further into either specialist role or moving up the ladder or doing both in the combo. For some, this realization comes a bit late, and while few summoned up their courage to take the plunge and still move laterally while others couldn't in fear of losing out all whatever they had accomplished so far or because of so many concerns in starting all over again.

For people on the way to a specialist or vertical growth and are in entry-level should aim to reach exit-level while the ones in between mid to exit level of their profile should aim for stepping up to entry-level of the next profile. Obviously while doing so, you will achieve a bit of specialist growth as well. I know a few of us would like to jump multiple steps but you have to be careful about not having it leading to more pressure and stress unnecessarily & causing more harm than any gain.

Finally, for the leaders who have made it to the top, impact creation or new challenges in solving something big, unknown, or meaningful become the sole reason of motivator to keep growing up in the career else it would again hit a saturation for them too sooner than later.

Final Note: Choose your place and manager wisely

You should always look for more learning opportunities and places that will give you wide enough exposure so as to grow your mindset and able to try new things wherever possible, especially at the beginning of your career. That would set your growth path right from the beginning. Startups definitely win fair and square here by miles. I have seen people getting swayed by short-term financial gain and missing this aspect and hence actually losing opportunities to grow in the future, which is perhaps financial loss in the long-run. You would find such opportunities to spread your horizon at great length in growing startups and equally lesser in the grown startups or big corporates. Still, everyone has to traverse the path step by step grabbing those opportunities and keep proving their worth to the company at each point in time.

You can read more detail, in one of my early articles, about what you should look for while joining any company.

In the end, money and stability will follow the talented and not the other way round

Also lastly, it means a great deal to have a good manager/mentor with you who can continuously provide you feedback on where do you stand and what more to be done to get to the next profile. In case you haven't had such discussions yet, I'd suggest initiating those with him/her asap :) This will help you define your own growth path as well as aligned with your manager/company to have it rewarded once you achieve what you set the path for. As most of you would know, people leave managers, not companies, and having no growth path set is one of the biggest reasons for it.

Would love to hear your or your team member growth stories so please do put that in the comment to inspire others as well as learn from it. :)