7 career advancing strategies
Don't count on luck for your career management
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I made it to Vice President at Amazon despite doing only an average job of managing my career.
It was all hard work and luck, no real plan.
You can’t count on luck, but here are 7 career advancing strategies that you can count on:
Work on large, global teams.
Work with people of all types of specialties, not just those in your field.
Work on longer, bigger projects to master handling complexity.
Learn intentionally about career progression - titles, performance reviews, and promotions (link to a promotion document framework).
Invest in relationships - network (tips from Andrew Yeung) and manage up (insights from Wes Kao).
Build social skills - practice influence, emotional intelligence, and public speaking.
Determine what kind of culture, manager, and work lets you be your best.
This is the training we don’t get in school: how to succeed in a corporate job and advance our careers.
At the beginning, we learn by trial and error.
If we are lucky we find a peer or a manager to guide us, or we pick up a formal mentor along the way.
But generally, we stumble along without a guide.
This list is that guide. It contains many of the things I learned slowly over the years with plenty of missteps. I am writing it here because you can’t count on having the luck that I had.
What you can do is work hard and optimize your career management.
The hard work is straightforward: Put in the long hours, move around for better jobs.
Career management is the complex part. Are you on top of all the things in the list above? Are you learning the advanced skills that open the door to leadership roles?
The "secret" to mastering career planning is treating "career management" as equal to "hard work" when you think about how to move up.
There are LOTS of hard working, talented people. If you want to stand out, you have to be smart about managing your career.
If I had known this 20 years ago, I would have gone much further much faster.
Don’t count on luck.
Make sure you are being intentional and intelligent about advancing your career.
Audience Q&A
Q1: What would you say is the (most common) ultimate X factor for executive career progression? I mean one absolute factor?
I’m ex-Amazon and I know there are/were hundreds of L8s in that company and similar FAANGs. In a sea of Directors, what is TYPICALLY the deciding factor in who gets the VP spot? Top performer? Top networker?
I don’t think it is one thing for all people.
I saw some people get promoted by being truly brilliant. Exceptional beyond their peers.
I saw some who were in the right place at the right time. Their products hit the market right, and they rode incredible growth. A combination of good work and right place, right time.
I did not see anyone clearly get there on politics, but I’m sure it happened. I did see people held back for lack of social acumen - being surly or hard to work with.
Top factor at least somewhat in your control: a high growth area.
Q2: I think # 7 is the one that has most amount of luck dependency. Curious to know why you are calling it intentional.
Intention is that if you do not fit the culture then you can work to change companies.
You can change companies to change culture or managers. You can also increase your emotional intelligence to be able to fit in and enjoy more cultures. I guess I always felt I had control of where I stayed.
Read this on how to find a great manager.
Q3: Interesting, doing a good job at core work did not warrant a spot in the list. Or do you feel this is not the major lever for upward growth in bigger organisations these days?
I did not mention doing good work because I assumed it was known or understood.
You are right that it is certainly necessary and perhaps since some people don’t bother to do a good job I should have mentioned it.
Read my Magic Loop for a 5-step framework for rapid career growth and how to build a win/win relationship with your manager and/or direct reports.
Q4: Curious about #4, what would that look like?
As a young person I had no idea of things like pay bands, and that by changing ranks or titles I could totally change my perceived value, was news to me.
Things like that are what I mean. Learning how corporate career ladders work.
Level Up Slack Community: What’s Been Happening
It’s been a busy and engaging week in our Slack community.
We have 13 channels led by Community Moderators, including:
External executive roles and how to get them.
AI, ML, and Data.
Product management.
System Design study group.
Finance business concepts.
Resume reviews, hiring, and more.
We profiled Community Moderator, Shankha S. Dey (Senior Director, Product at Salesforce—managing Data & AI business), learning his favorite mental model, most gifted book, best career advice received, and one thing he would use help with now.
Leaders are hiring for Principal Technical Program Managers at Amazon, multiple roles at Nubank, and more.
Members are reviewing each other’s resumes and planning virtual and in-person meetups. Members discussed takeaways from Meta’s Connect Developer conference, keys to the hiring manager interview, how to determine results with A/B tests, and more.
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Olympic Gold Medalist: Habits for Peak Performance — fireside chat with Justin Best
Justin Best (Olympic Champion and investment banker) and Jason Yoong (my Operating Partner) will have a fireside chat on peak performance and how Justin does it (e.g. balancing work and Olympic training, performance maintenance, productivity).
Jason here: I read about Justin's work/training schedule and immediately forwarded it to a few folks saying "this guy is a BEAST." I am excited to dive into this topic with Justin.
If you want to level up your performance, this talk is for you.
Live attendance is exclusive to newsletter paid subscribers.
Connect With Ethan & Jason
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Learn more about Ethan’s live online courses and on-demand courses.
Contact us for corporate training, speaking, podcast appearances, and more.
Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their Learning & Development budget, use this email template to send to your manager.
Excellent point that we don't receive this guidance in school. Almost have to be lucky to learn it at the right time.
Love this post. Points #2 and #3 are great. On #2, I think another potential perspective is to actually go and work in different specialties to get a broader view of things. Spending several years diving into very different roles turned out to have a much larger impact on my career trajectory toward CEO than I could have imagined.