Why You Should Treat Your Career Like a Start-Up

Learn how to treat your career like a start-up can lead to an ambitious and accomplished career.

Treat your career like a startup, because old career trajectories are no longer a thing in the 21^st century. People are no longer working for just one company, and relying on your employer to cover your retirement is not guaranteed anymore. This is why it is all the more important to start your income generating passion projects, learn to handle your finances, and generate skills that can be used across industries.

Adapting to this change requires two things, the mindset that you are a work in progress and building the adaptive skill set that is used by the best entrepreneurs.

The Start-Up of You

To provide a little different flavor of traditional career advice, I turned to Reid Hoffman’s (the founder of LinkedIn) book, The Start-up of You.

In the book, Hoffman outlines that the traditional career trajectory of putting your time in at one company and slowly ascending the ranks is no more.

Increasing globalization, technology, an increase of people entering the workforce, and the older generations not retiring has created a jammed career path. The best way to navigate this issue is to be like a startup, using an adaptive skill set to turn this situation to your advantage.

Reid lays out many different strategies. Below are my favorite strategies on how to treat your career as a start-up.

How to Treat Your Career Like a Start-up

1. Be in Permanent Beta

In software, a beta is a computer software that is undergoing testing and has not yet officially released. It is still in work.

By viewing your career, skills, and knowledge as in permanent beta, you are constantly developing yourself.

I am a big fan of the to-do list and getting tasks completed. Having things be on my to-do list for weeks drives me insane, and to me, there are few things better than finishing the assignment and getting to cross it off. With errands, this is fine, but with a career or skill development, this could be deadly.

In your career, you need to be constantly growing and developing. There is no “done” as satisfying as it would be. There is always something new to learn and to develop. The need to always develop sounded exhausting when I was thinking about the career I still have ahead of me, but thinking of my career as a permanent beta has helped do a mind-switch where it is now fun. You get to grow your skillset and upgrade into a better version.

You can move from version 0.1.0 to version 0.1.1 and continue to grow while acknowledging your progress.

2. Plan to Adapt

Making a ten-year career forecast, or chasing your passions are two types of traditional career planning techniques.

However, they are also static. A lot in the marketplace can change in ten years, and your passions change as you go through life. A more flexible way to career plan is the entrepreneurial career planning process. It’s about being flexibly persistent: always ready to adapt but also persistent in driving towards set goals.

How to Make an Adaptable Career Plan

1. Make explicit the assumptions and hypotheses in your plan: You will never have complete certainty; identify areas of incomplete knowledge about yourself or your industry and make plans that will help you fill those gaps. Ask for informational interviews from experts, or go online and do your research.
2. Learn by doing. Actions over plans generate lessons that will help in the next phase of the journey. Plus, this can build valuable marketable skills to better adapt if an opportunity arises.
3. Think two steps ahead. What next move will maximize the quantity and quality of follow-on opportunities? Follow-on opportunities are those that allow you to take on another assignment to further develop your skills or make more valuable connections.
4. Make the plan: Taking all of these items together, make an experimental Plan A, an alternative Plan B, and an unchanging plan Z.

Plan A: What you’re doing now. The current implementation of your competitive advantage.

 Plan B: You pivot to B when your plan isn’t working or when you discover a better way toward your goal. Perhaps another company is offering you more money, a better position, and is closer to home. That is when you jump to plan B (that becomes your new plan A).

Plan Z: Plan Z is for if something goes seriously wrong. It is your lifeboat you can jump to if your plan fails and need to recollect before going forward. It might mean moving back home with the parents for a little, and being under-employed. However, this is the worst-case scenario. Having a Plan Z lets you know that no matter how bad it gets, you can at least sustain yourself.

3. Pursue Breakout Opportunities

Traditionally, careers were slow and steady rises, with incremental steps, like a staircase. Through studying successful people’s path, this isn’t the case. As Reid states, “the trajectories of remarkable careers are not slow and steady…rather they are marked by breakout opportunities-career experiences that lead to unusually rapid gains.” You can develop habits to increase the likelihood you find great opportunities.

1. Be in motion and court selective randomness. Luck favors the man in motion. By doing things, the pot is stirring for you. Increasing the odds of seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations and opportunities.
2. Tap networks and associations of people. No one has achieved anything in a vacuum. Join organizations, and grow your network, because when you are looking for an opportunity, you are really looking for people who can get you to that opportunity.
3. Utilize constraints. When your back is against the wall, you can be amazed at how scrappy and resourceful you can be. Use this position to be positive and resourceful instead of demoralized.

Main Take-Aways

By shifting your career perspective, there is more of an emphasis on learning, making a differentiated skillset, having adaptive plans, and pursuing different breakout opportunities than the typical career structuring strategy. No longer is putting in your time the guaranteed way to success. You have to be scrappy and resourceful to get to the career you want. Which is honestly, a lot more fun of a way to get there. Become the start-up of you!

Action item

How does viewing your career in permanent beta shift what skills you should be developing? What is your Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z? Who can you reach out to today to help pursue a potential breakout opportunity?