How do I grow my career?
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How do I grow my career?

I'm often asked, "How do I grow my career?" Last time, I wrote about getting promoted where I suggested focusing on growing your career instead of defining success or failure based on whether you get your next promotion. My suggestion for growing your career is to work through five steps: set a vision, identify necessary skills, determine your gaps, make a plan, and periodically reassess.

Setting a vision starts with asking yourself where you want your career to be in five to ten years. This is the most critical question to answer as you get started growing your career. This is the future state vision for where you want to be. This is your destination. You shouldn't embark on a career journey without a vision in mind any more than you would embark on a car journey without a destination.

For me, my vision is to become a world-class expert in building AI products. I choose three years as the lower bound for your vision because anything less than three years is too incremental and you'll likely not stretch yourself to your full potential. You're probably already thinking about your next promotion and hopefully have specific goals in mind to get there.

Thinking five or more years out probably leads you to consider multiple promotions. For me, I don’t care much about getting promoted, but I do think it takes five to ten years to get world-class expertise in a new area.

I suggest ten years as the upper bound, if you're in tech, because our industry is too unpredictable to reliably anticipate the best role for you beyond that. How many people could have predicted ten years ago where generative AI would be today? Alexa didn't even exist ten years ago.

Your vision should include the kind of role you want. Do you want to be a manager or an individual contributor? Do you want to have a technical role or a non-technical role? Do you want to go broad as a generalist, or deep as a specialist? Do you want to start your own company or be retired?

If you’re not sure about your vision, think about what you enjoy. What excites you? What fires you up and gives you energy? For me, it’s about building things. Also think about what you’re good at. For me, it’s understanding how things work, especially related to technology. So my ideal job is a builder of technologies.

If you have to decide between what you enjoy and what you’re good at, I think you should choose what you enjoy, because it’s more fun to get good at something you enjoy than to try to enjoy something you’re good at.

I enjoy learning new things, like artificial intelligence and generative AI. So I work to learn and get better. That’s easier and more fun for me than trying to enjoy old things that I’m already good at, like being on-call.

Of course, we’re talking about our careers, not our hobbies. So we also have to consider what we can get paid to do. I’d love to be a professional husband. But I asked my wife and she said she wouldn’t pay me.

Jeff Bezos said, “You can have a job, or you can have a career, or you can have a calling.” If you’ve found your calling, you’ve hit the jackpot. Find your calling.

My calling is to help others. I look for tough customer problems that I can leverage my skills to solve well. Developing world class expertise in technical areas is just how I go about serving the underlying objective of helping others. That’s my calling. What’s yours?

It’s hard to talk about career growth without talking about promotion. But I want to clarify that I think there’s a big difference between the two. It can be distracting to worry about promotions. I’ve learned that thinking about career growth is a much better use of your time than thinking about promotions. Promotions are neither necessary nor sufficient to grow your career.

Promotions aren’t necessary because growing in place is a fabulous way of achieving happiness and satisfaction in your job. Don't get me wrong, promotions are a great acknowledgement of your contributions and potential. But by themselves, I don’t expect them to be all that meaningful. Together with the skills you’re gaining, they can be fantastic.

So my suggestion is to focus on growing your career, knowing what it takes to be promoted, but not defining success or failure based on whether you get your next promotion. Promotion will then be a natural outcome of your growth.

Promotions aren’t sufficient because you can be promoted into a role that doesn’t actually help you achieve your career objectives. What got you here won’t get you there. You can’t expect that you can keep doing what you’ve been doing, just more of it. It’s safer to assume that a promotion means you’re in a completely different role and you need to learn how to operate differently in that new role to be effective.

I've seen this phenomenon at some companies known as “promotion oriented architecture”. You may have heard of service oriented architecture, which is a great design pattern, but promotion oriented architecture is an anti-pattern. It’s where engineers and managers look for the most complex solution possible to help justify an employee’s promotion, with no real benefit to the customer.

Complexity, we know, is sometimes a necessary evil, but it’s still an evil. It’s why Amazon has a leadership principle called “Invent and Simplify”. It’s not called “Invent and Complicate”.

So don’t fall into that trap: making things more complicated, more difficult to build, more difficult to maintain, and which doesn’t deliver actual customer value. It’s much better to obsess over the customer than it is to obsess over your own promotion.

Alright, enough about promotions. Now that you have a vision, the next question is: what's necessary to be successful once you're there? This can include competencies, traits, experience, etc. Let’s refer to all of these as skills.

Start with your company's role guidelines for the role you'll have in your future state vision. Try to find people who are already in the role and ask them what skills are important for their success in that role. Ask your manager and mentors for their ideas on important skills for folks in that role.

Don't have a mentor? Get one, or five. Don’t know how to convince them to mentor you? Try offering them something for free. For me, I’ll rarely turn down a free coffee.

Now that you know what skills are needed to be successful in your vision, the next question is: what skills do you already have and which ones are still gaps? Start with a self assessment. Rate yourself on each skill.

Leverage feedback your manager or peers have given you. Ask your manager and mentors. Don't have a mentor?  Buy some coffee.  Make a list of the skills that that you'll need but don't have. These are your gaps.

Early in my career, I used to interview on a regular basis. Not because I was dissatisfied with my roles, but because I found that talking to recruiters and potential employers with open roles was a great way to assess the important skills that they were looking for.

I would apply to a job that was aligned with my vision and expect to fail. But after every rejection, I’d study and try to sign up for projects where I could develop the missing skills and experience.

Sometimes, I’d get lucky and someone would take a chance on me. For example, back in the 1990’s I had heard of this new programming language that was going to be great for desktop applications and challenge the dominance of Windows on PCs. It was called Java.

Of course, today, we know that Java’s sweet spot is for server side software, but there was a time when Java Swing was big. I applied for a job at Sun because, well, where better to learn about Java.

I had exactly zero work experience with Java. I totally bombed the interview, but the manager decided to take a chance on me and hired me anyway. I was super lucky to fill my Java programming skill gaps on the job.

By the time I left Sun seven years later, I was working alongside the industry Java experts defining the evolution of the language in specs known as JSRs – Java software requests, kind of like how internet protocols are defined in RFCs.

Now that you know which skills are your gaps, the next question is: what's your plan to acquire them? Every good plan includes a schedule, scope, and resources. The schedule is a timeline for when you'll acquire each skill. The scope is the list of skills and the level of proficiency of each (awareness, novice, intermediate, advanced, expert). The resources are how much time you'll commit to acquiring skills, how much money you'll spend on formal education, or how much coffee you'll buy to find a mentor.

You'll need to acquire skills on your gap list through learning. Learn by completing formal training. Check your company's internal learning resources for courses that teach the specific skill. Check your local university. Check online resources.

Learn by observing. Try to find people who are already exhibiting expertise in those skills and ask if you can shadow them to meetings. Pay attention in the meetings you're already in and watch those you admire to see how they operate.

Learn by doing. This is the most effective way to learn. Volunteer for assignments that will force you to put those skills into practice. Be careful not to get yourself in over your head though. You won't learn well by going too far out of your comfort zone into your panic zone (more on that in a bit).

Learn by teaching. Nothing crystalizes your understanding of a subject like studying it with the intent to teach it to someone else. It brings you back from unconscious competence to conscious competence.

Teaching is a great way to uncover a deeper understanding of something. Take tying your shoes as an example. You start off as a child with your parents tying your shoes for you. You don’t know that you don’t know how to tie your shoes. You're unconsciously incompetent.

Then you grow up a little and want to do it yourself. But you try and realize it’s harder than it looks. You’re now consciously incompetent.

Then you practice and practice and ask for help until you can finally do it yourself. But it takes a lot of effort. You have to really concentrate to tie your own shoes. You're now consciously competent.

Eventually, you do it over and over so much that you can do it without even thinking about it. You’re now unconsciously competent.

And then you have kids and start tying their shoes. And they want you to teach them how to do it. So you have to slow down and take apart the process so you can carefully explain it to them. That’s going back to consciously competent.

Know what zone you’re in. You’re in the comfort zone when you’re over qualified for a job and you never break a sweat. You do your work and it’s comfortable. The problem is, you’re not being challenged and you’re not learning anything.

At the other extreme, when you’re under qualified for a job, you fail more often than you succeed. Everything takes longer and seems harder. You can’t figure out why things aren’t working and you’re continually stressed out. You’re in the panic zone.

Somewhere between the panic zone and the comfort zone is the learning zone where you grow. You don’t always succeed, but you’re ok with taking some risks that stretch your abilities so that you can learn and grow.

When I was a teenager, I was an expert on parenting. I knew all the mistakes that my parents made, especially when they disagreed with me, and I vowed to never make the same mistakes when I became a parent.

Of course, when I eventually became a parent, I suddenly gained an appreciation for how hard it is to be a parent. Before I tried management, I thought, ”how hard can it be?”

The best plans have goals and the best goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. We’re all familiar with our team and organization's goals. We don’t often enough set goals for our own career. Goals are the intermediate milestones along your career path that will help you achieve your vision by acquiring the skills and filling in the gaps you’ve identified.

Now that you have a plan to acquire your skills, it's important to periodically re-evaluate progress against that plan. As with any plan, adjust it if you find that it's not effective. Measure effectiveness of your plan by the rate at which you acquire missing skills and the level of proficiency of each skill. Decide if you should apply more resources (like time or coffee).

As with many things in life, this is not a one and done deal if you want to continue to grow. I suggest iterating through the five steps as you progress on your career journey. You'll want to adjust as you learn more about yourself and your career. Consider short-term changes within your five to ten year plan to achieve your vision.

Promotions are one change that will very likely introduce you to new opportunities to learn and grow. But don’t rule out lateral moves. I've moved laterally many times.

One thing that is often overlooked is demotions. There’s a stigma associated with demotions that I think is unfortunate. I’ve known people who are much happier and further along in their career because they’ve asked for and been granted a demotion.

And don’t be afraid to completely blow up your plan if the vision you laid out at some point in the past is no longer right for you. Things change. Life happens. The vision I had for my career when I was 20 completely changed after I had children.

I thought I would be one of those over-achievers that always works 80+ hours per week. But as it turns out, work-life balance is pretty important when you have a family that you’d rather spend time with.

And I thought that getting into management as soon as possible was the best way to progress in my career. Now, I realize I don’t have to rush in to it and I can have a whole lot of impact and fun being an individual contributor. Your path doesn’t have to be a straight line. Zigs and zags along the way are natural and expected.

So that's how I answer the question, "How do I grow my career?":

  1. set a vision based on what you’re good at but mostly based on what you enjoy,
  2. identify the skills necessary to succeed in that future state from role guidelines and role models,
  3. determine your gaps,
  4. make a plan with scope, schedule, and resources to fill the gaps by using different learning techniques and setting SMART goals, and
  5. periodically reassess, including throwing everything out and starting again if necessary.

Hope that helps. What do you think? Do you have any other questions I can answer? Let me know in the comments!

#LuusAnswers #CareerAdvice #CareerGrowth #CareerPlan #AmazonLife

Mrudula Deore

Business Technology Consultant at ZS | Program Management

5mo

This is such a good read! thanks for sharing Luu! What advice would you offer if 'what energizes you' part of vision setting step is not related to the current educational and professional experience?

Karen S.

Global Project Team Member tasked with transitioning operations activities from a legacy system to cloud based model using Salesforce & SAP

5mo

Great Advice

Stephen Molloy

Seasoned expert in domain driven design, domain/data strategy, and execution.

5mo

Thanks Luu. It’s been a long time! What about beyond solving for employers? I have worked for some great companies over the years and solved some big challenges. I have switched to what gives me energy personally and won’t just grow my career just looking for more responsibility or money. Life is too short. Look for what energizes you.

Tyler Wick

Mitigation Eng @ LinkedIn | Automation, Coaching, Leadership

5mo

Luu Tran thank you for sharing on here! I enjoyed reading your blog at AWS internally, and I am super thrilled you cross post here now :)

Elizabeth Rozet

Employer Brand @Amazon | Empowering Future Top Voices | Chronic Illness Awareness

5mo

This is incredible!!

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