We live in an incredible time where the idea of success no longer has a particular cookie-cutter shape that everyone thinks they’re supposed to aspire to.
Instead, a myriad of potential paths is presented, allowing us to pursue the balance of passion, power and financial reward that feels right, and on our terms with regard to work style, location and more.
Yet despite this new-found flexibility, navigating the career path suddenly feels even more complicated – especially early in our career when we’re still defining our unique skills and learning what makes us tick, both personally and professionally. That’s without even considering whether we may want to factor a family into those plans.
So how can we be sure we’re on the right track?
Reflecting on my career and those of my peers, over the last decade or so, there are a few core principles that come to mind that, at whatever age and stage, will ensure you are setting yourself up for long-term success, and having fun along the way.
Be empowered
Feeling in control of your career in the early days feels almost impossible. You lack the richness of experience and proven strategies for success that would give you an edge, and instead feel like one small cog in a large machine at someone else’s disposal.
I have seen many people relinquish control in this situation, and follow the path of progress their superiors lay down for them. They wait (often in vain) for professional development opportunities to be provided, and slowly move up the chain.
To me, this seems like a relic from a past era.
Today, to break ahead of the pack, you have to empower yourself, and be accountable for your own personal and professional development from day one.
Women especially are disadvantaged by today’s typical workplace structures, and yet very few of us are able to carve out the conditions that suit us in terms of work-life balance, while still being able to contribute the way we want to in a professional context. It has become about trade-offs instead of system redesign.
By taking control of your own learning and development, you quickly get an understanding not just of your skills and strengths, but how to build a career that supports your life goals and keeps you in charge.
This may still mean being a part of a large organisation with top-down structures, but having a sense of both your potential and your value will give you a much stronger platform for negotiation.
Don’t wait, create opportunities
One of the most valuable things I have learned from watching incredible women peers and mentors achieve success is that they don’t wait for the right opportunity to come along for them. Instead, they act where they see a need, or pursue an interest from a hobby to something more serious, ultimately getting closer to their dream career, while building a portfolio of valuable experience at the same time.
These projects don’t have to become a commercial success, gain publicity or accolades – many will fade away as quickly as they came to mind.
But what matters is the process of refining an idea, building a network of support and learning how to execute to get something off the ground, however big or small.
Diverse experience of this nature can take years, even decades, to gain within an organisation as our workplaces can be so siloed these days, but friends and mentors who have thrown themselves into the deep end have accelerated their path considerably.
So whatever is keeping you up at night, or whatever issue has you Googling and investigating constantly, create something tangible from it and make an investment in your interest. You won’t regret it, and who knows – it might just take off.
Good stuff takes time
As a Generation Y woman, I have been impatient to achieve career successes, as have many of my friends and peers. We typically don’t stay at jobs for more than a few years; we can’t be pinned down; we feel entitled to career progress despite our relative experience.
But as I enter my thirties, I have finally realised that things that are worth doing require time and patience, especially if they are serving my ultimate long-term goals.
Short-term projects can suddenly become life-long passions, and the milestone of completion edges further away as we raise the bar on what we think is possible.
While it’s enticing sometimes to want to move on to other ideas, especially when the going is tough, I have learned over the last few years the value of deep expertise, and the richness and satisfaction that comes from doing something not just once or twice, but over and over again.
Being able to see things from more than one angle and viewpoint; encountering gritty challenges and facing them head on, instead of moving on – these have become new marks of success. It has given me not just the benefit of hindsight, but also a measure of the progress I have made both personally and professionally.
It also gives me new respect for the incredible organisations that are changing our world, and the brilliant women leaders we can aspire to who have proven that some things are worth doing right.
There is no one way to build a career – we are lucky to be able to follow a path that suits us and find the ‘right’ fit, whatever that may be. The most important thing in all of this is to know what your north star is – use it to make decisions about your next steps and always keep it on your horizon.
Lauren Anderson is speaking at the She Leads conference in Canberra on May 13. See more on the event here.