Students and young professionals frequently ask me how I planned out my career to become president of Fidelity Investments. My answer has always been clear: “There was no grand plan. I backed into my career one step at a time.” Most successful executives would give the same answer.
When I was attending college and law school, I never planned to become the president of a financial services giant. At the time, I thought I would become a professor or a federal regulator. Indeed, at the start of my career, I held positions as a law professor, a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a partner in a law firm. During those fourteen years, I learned a lot about myself and the financial sector. I found that I really liked doing deals and managing people, rather than writing articles and drafting regulations.
That’s why I accepted a job offer as general counsel to Fidelity Investments when it was a relatively small company in 1987. I was fortunate to be part of a company and an industry that were expanding rapidly. For almost a decade, I broadened my skills by developing new products, helping the company enter new markets and learning to manage people. For a complex set of reasons, including some related to the external pressures on the company, I was chosen in 1997 to be president of Fidelity Investments.
What does my history suggest about your career planning? That you don’t control the trajectory of your career. There are just too many factors beyond your control that will shape your job opportunities—such as global economic trends, political elections, industry regulation, and company finances. So don’t commit the hubris of thinking that you can determine your professional glide path.
On the other hand, you can increase your probability of success by approaching your career with the right mind-set. Career planning isn’t a onetime event; it’s a continual process that has to be actively managed over a lifetime. At each step, you need to ask yourself: What can I do next that will maximize my options in the future?
The first step in this process is to formulate a list of a few jobs that you eventually hope to hold—these are your Career Aims. In order to create this list intelligently, you should critically evaluate three subjects: your interests, your skills, and market demand.
Assess Your Interests
To start thinking about your Career Aims, figure out what characteristics of a job appeal to you now. To jump-start that process, consider these questions.
• What topics—e.g., public policy, civil engineering—do you find most enjoyable and interesting?
• Do you prefer reading and writing or playing around with numbers?
• Do you like to focus on project details or analyze broad trends?
• Do you prefer to work with colleagues or by yourself?
• Do you want to work on your own schedule, or are you willing to keep regular hours?
• Do you want to travel as part of your work, or do you prefer to stay near your home?
• What values of your employer and colleagues are most important to you?
• What social or public purposes, if any, do you want to pursue in your career?
• How much do you care about a job’s salary relative to these personal goals and values?
Your answers to these questions will suggest a broad list of jobs that you might like. If you’re at the beginning of your career, don’t make the mistake of considering only the most obvious professions: doctors, dentists, lawyers, consultants, bankers, and engineers. What about geologists, nutritionists, advertising sellers, or commodity traders? When you put together your wish list, look at a long list of occupations like the one compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.1
For those of you in the middle of your careers, the list of potential jobs is likely to be narrower, as you have probably chosen a profession or general line of work. For you, Career Aims may include a more senior position within your organization, a job in a different industry, or owning your own business. Nevertheless, within this narrower set, you should still create a broad list of potentially appealing jobs. Or you may be in the midst of a career crisis, thinking of changing professions entirely. In that case, you should cast a wider net.
Your next task is to learn more about what these jobs actually entail. This will help you delete some jobs entirely and clarify which jobs you might like the most. To gather this information, start by searching the Internet and attending job fairs; those sources will give you a rough description of the main facts about a given career. Soak up as much career counseling as you can get your hands on, including professional advice if you can afford it. A good career counselor can open up avenues you never would have considered.
To get the best grip on the day-to-day details of a particular job, interview people in that line of work. Talk to your friends and neighbors to see who they might know, or ask your guidance counselor to arrange a job-shadowing program. Once you find the right person to interview, ask him or her questions such as:
• What is a typical day in this job like?
• What do you like best and least about this job?
• Does this job help you learn and grow?
• How did you get started in this job?
• What job do you hope to hold in five or ten years?
• What is the starting salary and average pay for this job?
Determine Your Aptitudes and Skills
After you have a long list of jobs that you might enjoy doing, think about what skills you can offer to the world—and whether they match any jobs on your list. Consider not only your formal credentials but also your intangible personal skills, such as the ability to think on your feet or empathize with the less fortunate.
In some occupations, the formal prerequisites are well known. To practice as a litigator, for example, you have to graduate from an accredited law school and pass the bar exam. For other occupations, you’ll have to search harder for the job requirements. For instance, what are the educational requirements to become a physical therapist? I had to call a physical therapist friend of mine to find out: six years of university studies, including a significant period of practical training in a clinic.
Beyond these formal requirements, you will need a personal set of skills that match the demands of the occupation. To work at a nonprofit charity, you will need fund-raising skills, empathy, and patience to deal with its many constituencies—including donors, employees, and service communities. To work as a bond trader on Wall Street, you will need to be an instantaneous decision maker who can quickly absorb a lot of information and evaluate competing bids.
Sometimes, especially when you’re young, it’s tough to be honest about whether you really have the skills you need for a certain career. As a teenager, I wanted to become a professional basketball player. I used to shoot hoops at the playground for entire afternoons, working on my jump shot. Unfortunately, college scouts never gave me a call: they had no need for a six-foot forward with middling talent. If I had chosen a college based on its basketball team, that would have been an exercise in self-delusion.
To help you honestly assess what you have to offer to the world, this endnote2 has a link to a long list of transferable skills. Go through the list and find the skills that you already have or could easily obtain.
Next, make sure that your skills match those required in your desired profession. To ascertain what skills a job really requires, you should start by searching the standard sources for relevant information. But, again, those sources will be of limited help. To get a good understanding of the necessary skills, you will have to talk with people already in these jobs.
Judge Market Demand
After reviewing your interests and skills, you should evaluate whether there is sufficient market demand for your desired career. Unfortunately, some people undergo hardship before they take market demand into account. Consider the story of Joe Therrien, a drama teacher from New York City.3 After several years of teaching, Joe decided to get a master’s degree in puppetry, a degree that cost him $35,000 to obtain. When he finished his degree, however, there were no puppetry jobs to be found. So he returned to his old teaching job—as a substitute, for about half his former pay.
Even if there are some jobs in your desired profession, there may be too much supply relative to the demand. Take sportscasting, for instance. Although radio and television stations certainly employ sportscasters, this modest demand is dwarfed by the number of young men and women who love sports and think they’d make good announcers. As a result, it’s very difficult to get your foot in the door in that field.
Don’t just look at market demand by taking a snapshot in time; find out where the industry is going. Is it expanding or contracting? To take a simple example, coal-fired power plants face long-run decline, while renewable sources of energy are a potential growth engine.
Now that you’ve formulated your tentative Career Aims, you’re ready to think about your next step. Don’t try to figure out the complete trajectory for your entire career. Instead, ask whether your next job will move you in the right direction—by maximizing your options in the future.
I recently mentored a young man just out of college who was trying to plan his entire career in one fell swoop. Almost every week he wanted my opinion on which jobs he should hold at every stage in his life. My answer was always the same: “Don’t try to nail down your entire career path all at once. Instead, focus on what you can ascertain now: what would be a sensible next step to help you move in the right direction or put you in a better position to make more informed choices about your career in the future?”
To maximize your options at each step in your career, pursue a combination of formal classroom education and informal learning on the job. In both environments, seek knowledge and skills that would be transferable to many types of jobs in the future.
Get Education and Training
Formal education is a well-established way to expand your career options. From a purely practical standpoint, a formal education may provide you with a needed credential; for example, you can’t legally be a doctor without going to medical school. But a good education is more than a passport: you gain valuable knowledge along the way. On average, an extra year of education will increase your lifetime pay by around 8 to 9 percent.4
Given the rapid pace of development in the business and political world, you should expect to continue your formal education even after you start working. Some large organizations, such as General Electric and the World Bank, have their own top-notch training programs. Other organizations will pay some or all of your costs to get a second degree at night or on weekends. Such part-time degrees may have a better cost-benefit ratio than taking several years off work to attend a full-time graduate school. In any event, members of many professions must meet continuing education requirements to retain their license to practice.
Regardless of the format your education takes, choose a subject that will lead to a broad range of careers. This might mean rethinking that degree in creative writing, even if you find it intellectually stimulating. Though the world needs some people to write novels, the career prospects in the field are extremely limited. And don’t specialize too early. For instance, although a degree in fabric styling may seem practical, there are only a few different careers where this major would be useful.
In my view, you can increase your career options if you start by studying a “hard” subject instead of a “soft” one. A hard subject is one that is more rigorous, where there is generally a right answer and a wrong answer, such as physics. You should learn hard subjects first because they teach you the fundamental skills that are needed to evaluate softer subjects. For example, if you first obtain a rigorous education in statistical methods, you will have some of the tools necessary to analyze the impact of many public policies. Furthermore, softer subjects are easier to learn on your own. You might be able to pick up the main ideas of a certain field of sociology by reading some papers, but you probably can’t learn the fundamentals of neurophysiology without formal instruction.
Learn on the Job
After you obtain your desired formal schooling, or perhaps while you’re still obtaining it, choose a job in which you can develop new skills or areas of expertise. Learning by doing should not be an afterthought: economists have estimated that the lifetime value of on-the-job training is roughly equal to an additional four years in the classroom.5 But just as with formal schooling, make sure the skills you are developing are transferable.
For instance, if you take a job putting together airplane leases, you could become the world’s expert on that subject. But this expertise is so narrow that it’s not likely to help you in any other line of work. By contrast, if you take a job that relates in any way to corporate taxation, you can acquire a lot of transferable knowledge. Although you may be working on tax issues that are relevant only to certain types of companies, you will be learning how to analyze tax problems and devise creative solutions. Since all businesses want to reduce their taxes, those skills will help you land future jobs in a variety of industries.
One important aspect of learning on the job is learning about yourself and your career options. At each job, find out more about what you actually enjoy doing and what you’re good at. Furthermore, try to learn about other positions that you frequently interact with—what skills they require and what jobs they lead to. If you can gather all this information, you’ll be in a much better position to decide the next step in your career.
When you’re deciding on your next job, you should try to gain some skills or expertise likely to apply to a broad range of future jobs. Here are some examples.
Develop Leadership Skills
Leadership is a skill that is inherently transferable and will always be in demand, so try to choose a job that will allow you to lead others. Consider Sarah, a highly skilled securities trader. For her next promotion, Sarah may be given a choice: trade securities in a new sector for higher pay, or start managing some of the firm’s traders at the same pay. Even though it may not feel like an advancement, Sarah should take the management position in order to gain leadership skills that will be invaluable later in her career.
But you don’t need an official title of “manager” to gain leadership skills. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) train officers by putting its young recruits into many different types of high-stress situations, with little direction from the top. This is a great way to force recruits to exercise creativity and judgment in resolving tough problems—exactly the skills required to be a leader in civilian and military life. As an example, one team was assigned to solve the problem of back pain in helicopter pilots, an issue that was baffling army doctors. Without guidance, the team had to learn how best to measure back pain and why piloting a chopper seemed to bring about sore backs. After completing their exploration, they redesigned the pilots’ seats to solve the problem—again without guidance.
Any job that hones your leadership skills in challenging situations will help you prepare for more senior positions. But make sure the job allows you to fail occasionally—without career-ending consequences. The IDF, for example, is quite tolerant of young officers who fail as long as they have taken a well-designed risk—distinguishing, in the words of Professor Loren Gary, between “a well-planned experiment and a roulette wheel.”6 After the failure of a “well-planned experiment,” the young officers debrief their superiors and try to explain how the project could be improved for next time.7
Learn About Other Cultures
Gaining experience outside your home country is a good way to maximize your career options in this increasingly flat world. I lived for almost two years in Africa and have spent considerable time in England, Japan, and China. Through those experiences, I learned to deal with different economic, cultural, and political environments—which later helped me evaluate or start business units throughout the world. Indeed, many multinational corporations won’t consider you for top positions unless you’ve had this sort of international exposure.
Although there are potential drawbacks to foreign postings, you can minimize them with a little foresight. First, employees in foreign offices are sometimes neglected by headquarters. Before moving to a foreign office, try to spend time at headquarters so you can develop contacts—especially mentors—and learn how the organization operates. Second, it’s often difficult for employees in foreign offices to find a good job when returning to headquarters. Having a mentor at headquarters will keep you plugged in to what is happening there and help you identify job openings at the right time. Finally, moving to a foreign country may place a large burden on your family, especially if your children are school age. So ask for special financial assistance to place your children into high-quality private schools in those foreign countries.
Expand Your Organizational Experience
There are many different types of organizations: corporations, partnerships, nonprofits, and government agencies. If you’ve worked in only one type of organization, finding a job in another type can expand your career options. For instance, employers at some for-profit companies are reluctant to hire people who have worked only in government agencies. The employers are concerned about whether such applicants can make the transition from government to business.
Similarly, I’ve seen employers at publicly traded companies refuse to consider top-quality executives who have worked only for private companies. Running a public company does require some specialized knowledge related to SEC mandates and quarterly earnings reports. But those skills can be learned quickly by talented executives; all it takes is a short stint at a public company. Once you complete this short stint, you will look more attractive to a wider range of companies.
Grow Your Network
In addition to developing your skills and knowledge, your next step should help you expand your web of personal relationships with peers. To paraphrase a slogan, “Organizations don’t hire people. People hire people.” The more people you know in your industry, the more people will think of you when a job pops open—even when it is not publicly advertised.
To some extent, you can develop your network even without taking a new career step. When you have the opportunity, attend conferences or participate in committees at trade associations. When you do, arrive early so you can chat with people and exchange cards; follow up with a polite email or a request to connect on LinkedIn. Then you will have a group of knowledgeable people with whom you can discuss industry trends.
But such event-driven networking pales in comparison with the networks you build simply by working with colleagues. This sort of networking within an organization is usually informal and can create deep bonds. If you’re already in midcareer, you’ve probably met many fellow employees at internal meetings or client presentations. You’ve spent a day or more traveling with colleagues. You’ve used those occasions to get to know them well. Those deeper relationships have made your current work more enjoyable and might help you find an unadvertised job in the future.
As you ponder your next career step, then, think about the networking advantages you might gain from it. You can grow your network by accepting a job in another unit of the same firm or by heading an interdisciplinary project staffed by people from various units. If you’re even more ambitious, you can expand your network by going to work for a new company or in a new industry.
Your approach to choosing the next step will depend on where you are in your career—at the start, in the middle, or toward the end.
Beginning Your Career
In the best of all worlds, you would love your job, it would pay well, and you would perform it expertly. In effect, you would be paid well to do a job that you would choose to do anyway.
Unfortunately, the reality is that you may not be able to get a lucrative job that you love at every step in your career. Sometimes your expertise in a certain subject doesn’t translate into jobs that are in demand. In other cases, taking a job doing what you love may not be the best career move to make. In the early years, you may need to take a job that you dislike because it is the only option available to you. Or you may choose an unpleasant job that helps you gain skills (or savings) that you will need later.
For instance, some people take an all-consuming job as an investment banker in the short term to gain industry knowledge, pay off student loans, or save up money to start a business on their own. Similarly, young doctors must endure the grueling schedules and stress of residency training in order to complete their education. And many future Hollywood stars, such as Marc Norman, the Oscar-winning director of Shakespeare in Love, get their start earning a pittance in the mail room of a movie studio. Though these individuals may not “like” their current jobs, they are willing to put up with them so that they can get a better job later on.
Conduct an Annual Checkup
Even after you’re well established in a career path, you should periodically reevaluate whether your current job is best for you. Personally, I advocate treating this process like a routine physical: you should do it every year.8
Why so often? Because a lot can happen in a year. Your preferences may change. You may learn more about the pros and cons of your current job. There may be significant changes in your physical condition, your family situation, or your financial portfolio.
During the same year, external factors may change. You may get a new boss or new colleagues, or your firm may be acquired by another organization. The demand for your firm’s goods and services may increase or decrease, along with the competition you face.
To help you perform an annual checkup on your Career Aims, consider the following questions:
• During the last year, have there been any major changes in what you want from your job? What caused those changes?
• During the last year, what external events significantly affected your current job? Were these changes at the level of your firm, your industry, your country, or the world?
• How do those internal and external changes impact your long-term Career Aims? What will you do differently in the next year as a result?
• Is your current job preparing you for the next step? What transferable skills have you learned? Are you receiving the guidance and opportunities that you were promised?
• Do you want to be in the same position in one year? Three years? Ten years?
When you answer these questions, you may feel satisfied with your current position or could be satisfied with only modest changes. Alternatively, you may realize that your current job is not right for you. If so, you should figure out what next steps are likely to move you toward the jobs you want to hold.
Plan for Retirement
Although I’ve geared most of this chapter to a professional’s path toward the top, the transition from the top toward a relaxing and stimulating retirement is no less challenging.
Retirement used to be an all-or-nothing decision. In the past, most people worked full-time until a certain age, at which point they retired. Today, the transition to retirement is often a longer process. According to a study done by the AARP, 68 percent of those aged fifty to seventy plan to work into their seventies or beyond.9 However, these individuals still want to reduce their workload.
I see these preferences when I speak to audiences on the subject of retirement. I frequently ask, “How many of you want to work full-time until age seventy-two?” I usually see only one or two hands in the air—the true workaholics. But when I ask how many individuals want to keep working part-time to age seventy-two, I see most hands raised; people want to stay connected to their place of work.
This trend, called “phased retirement,” is driven partly by the financial problems caused by longer life expectancy and inadequate savings.10 But phased retirement is also driven by many professionals’ desire to continue working for its own sake. In a poll of phased retirees, 70 percent of those aged sixty-six and over cited the “desire to stay mentally active” and the “desire to remain productive and useful” when asked to explain why they were still working.11 To those individuals, work is much more stimulating than an extra round of golf.
To plan for your retirement career, you need to try out new roles and develop relationships during the decade before you retire. So while you’re still working, look around your community for organizations that could use a helping hand. Consider offering your expertise to local teenagers by joining a mentorship organization or by teaching a class at your local school. See if there are any local businesses that could make use of your accumulated wisdom.
I personally faced this challenge when I turned sixty-five and left the chairmanship of MFS. In anticipation of my retirement, I started teaching at a business school, joined another board, and took a few chess lessons. I started to write articles and books on financial topics. I even tried my hand writing a book about personal productivity! In this way, I have created an array of possible options for a satisfying retirement.
Many of my friends have taken a more relaxed approach toward generating retirement options. A doctor friend of mine prepared for retirement by honing her skills as an amateur playwright. Once she retired, she would write a scene of a new play on days when she was not playing golf. Another friend of mine joined the board of a local opera company as his working days were winding down. During the final years at his firm, he successfully positioned himself to become chairman of the opera company’s board after his retirement.
1. Don’t try to formulate one trajectory for your career. Instead, think of your career as a series of steps—with you gaining knowledge and skills at each step.
2. Assess your own characteristics, skills, and preferences when considering a job or career change. Be honest about what’s important to you.
3. Research your desired careers in various ways: interview people in the field, attend conferences, and read related articles.
4. Look carefully at external demand before focusing on one career or industry. Does the world want many more people in this profession?
5. When making each step along your career path, try to maximize the number of options you will have for your next step.
6. Don’t overspecialize too early. Choose jobs that will teach you skills that will transfer to other careers.
7. Pick a job that will teach you how to lead, how to operate in different types of organizations, or how to navigate another country’s business environment.
8. You may have to accept an unpleasant intermediate step in order to reach your ultimate Career Aims.
9. Revise your goals annually throughout your career; that will help you identify the right time to move forward or stay where you are.
10. In order to have an active retirement, get involved with local organizations and try out new activities while you’re still working.