A mentee inspired this post, when they asked the following question: “What was the biggest thing you learned when transitioning from a student to a professional”. In response, I shared one of my favorite answers: “Call your shots” (which I will expand upon further in this post). As I was sharing this, a few other pieces of advice came to mind, and that is what I will be sharing with you all today.
1. Call Your Shots
This is my favorite response to that question, because to me, when I started “calling my shots”, that’s when I saw the biggest growth in my career. For the first 6 years of my career, I kept my career goals to myself. I was working hard to achieve them, but I worked on them in silence. I had often been told that, you need to be careful about who you tell your career goals to because that would be seen as you’re trying to leave or don’t like what you’re doing.
This mindset changed, in 2020 when I was taking on a role where I needed more for myself before taking it on. As the hiring manager was offering the role to me, I told him that I needed 2 things:
- I was going to grad school (I was just accepted to Carnegie Mellon University)
- I needed leadership opportunities (aka I wanted to be a manager)
For me, I needed to make it clear that my plan was not to be “employee number 10”, but to be a leader in the organization. I needed people to see me as a leader, because I wanted to leverage that to show why I could be a great manager. Later during a one-on-one with him, I would officially tell him I wanted to be a manager, which led to him telling me there would be an opportunity coming up. After that conversation happened, within 6 months, I would become a manager for my organization.
Since then, I have continued to call my shots, telling people my overall career goal is to be a CTO. By doing this, people often will provide me with advice that helps me to grow closer towards that goal. What I have found is that when people know you and your goals, often they will want to help you. They will give you advice for where they think you can improve and where you’re doing well. Of course, it is up to you to decide on what advice you want to take, but ultimately telling people about your goals does more good than bad.
2. You Might Not Like Your First Role
Ok, I am going to be transparent with the world. Yes, I have worked at Microsoft my entire career. Yes, I didn’t like my first role. When I share this people are often surprised because they think you’re at a great company, you’re automatically going to like your role. For me, I was at the right company, just in the wrong role for me. While I like support, I needed what I would call Support+. This means I needed support plus something else and learning this, is what allowed me to make better decisions for my career.
How I realized this was in my first role, I started paying attention to what I enjoyed and what I disliked. What I learned that I liked is helping people, I constantly would go above and beyond to make sure they got their problem solved. What I learned that I didn’t like is the that the work wasn’t project based, and I wanted to prevent the problems from happening, I just wasn’t in a space where I could do that yet. After reflecting on my likes & dislikes, I knew I needed to steer myself to a different role. When I did change roles, I found myself enjoying my work so much more.
Overall, the reason why I share this is you might not like your first role but pay attention to what you like and don’t like. Often, when I have my mentees do this, I’ve stopped them from leaving their companies. This is because they’re in the right company but the wrong role. This can happen anywhere, and I share this advice with mentees because even being somewhere great doesn’t fix being in the wrong role.
3.Treat Your Career Like Degree
I was at this event called Inside the Executive Suite at the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Annual Convention, sitting with vice presidents (VP), directors, & executives. I had volunteered to help with the event and was the only individual contributor sitting at the table. This opportunity allowed me to hear the challenges, advice, and various other details that only that level of leadership experiences. The one piece of advice that stood out to me was this from a VP at Intel: “Treat your career like a 4-year degree”. He expanded to tell me how he breaks the 4-years down so he could continue to make progress in his career every year.
This stood out to me was because in my first role, I was told, “If I wanted to focus on my career, I would need to go somewhere else”. What everyone wants to hear as a 21-year-old entering the workforce right? This was told to me by someone who spent their whole career in the same role, and just didn’t seem happy. At that time, it could have been very easy for me to end up in a similar situation…if I didn’t plan for my career to be different. So, this VP’s advice was very timely.
The reason why I often tell mentees this is because this differs from school to being employed. Being employed make it very easy to be complacent, if you’re not directly paying attention to your career. You wake up, do your morning routine, go to work, enjoy your evening, do your evening routine, and repeat. If you don’t have a goal or a plan for what you want to do next, it is very easy to get stuck. The advice the VP gave me, taught me, your career growth is intentional. From his advice, this taught me, only you can be accountable for your career.
Summary
Overall, the theme with each of these pieces of advice is that you must treat your career with intention. No one can “call your shots”, no one can tell you what you like or dislike, and no one can plan your career for you. All 3 of these are intentional, and if you keep these in mind early in your career, you’ll be further ahead than you peers. The advice I shared with you can be the difference between being stuck and achieving the dream career you’ve always wanted.
If you’re looking for more advice that can help you with your career, feel free to check out other blog posts or even sign up for a mentorship session. We would love to help you become the high performer you’ve always wanted to be and to achieve your career goals.
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