Early in my career, I used to measure my progress by external metrics: promotions, compensation, recognition, etc. These things certainly matter. Promotions expose you to larger scope, serve as a yardstick across companies, and set upper bounds on your compensation. Compensation is important because it is a measure of the value of your time (although you should quickly try to get into a career in which you don’t rent out your time). All of these measures of career progress are lagging indicators and do not give you as much leverage as the best metric to measure your career progress: Your rate of learning.
Nowadays, the primary yardstick I use to measure my career progression is whether I am experiencing step changes in my learning every six months. Your skillsets and capabilities are what will give you your next opportunity. They will give you higher compensation because you can create more value for the company. They will give you more leverage on your time because you can scale better. Most of all, you will enjoy a more rewarding and intellectually stimulating career.
Everyone says that they want to keep learning new things in their job but in practice, it is really hard to do. There is a subtle but insidious reason for this. If you are learning at a fast pace, your job will feel a bit uncomfortable. You will feel like you are producing sub-par work. You will likely feel some imposter syndrome. You will worry about being replaced or getting bad performance reviews. After a while, you will learn the new skills needed to do your job well, but it will take more effort and time than it would take someone more experienced. For example, you might have to put in a 70 hour work-week instead of a 40 hour work-week. The final step is to be able to do the same job at the same quality level, but faster. Soon, you will be able to work a 40 hour work-week (or even less) and produce great results. The trailing indicators will reflect this. You might get a big bonus, a raise, or even a promotion. Meanwhile, you are enjoying a great work-life balance. You’re a star and you do it all effortlessly. Life is great, right?
Wrong. Congratulations, you have now stopped learning. This is why it is so hard to always stay on a steep learning curve. Your extrinsic measures of career progression are inversely correlated with your learning metric. If you are crushing it at work, getting raises and bonuses, and don’t have to put in a lot of work to get these results, it feels good. You pat yourself on the back for the career progression results. In reality though, these indicators mean that your rate of learning has slowed down or even stalled.
Now, this might be OK. You might be at a phase in your life in which you want have a healthy work-life integration, to spend more time with friends and family, to nurture hobbies outside of work, etc. There is nothing wrong with this and I am not making any judgments. However, if your goal is to rapidly rise in your career, then being a star who does it all effortlessly should be a flashing alarm klaxon that you have stopped learning.
In some industries and companies, the external environment will force you to stay on a steep learning curve. Management consulting firms like McKinsey are famous for putting their employees on the next learning curve as soon as they have mastered the skills at their existing level. Startups in the hypergrowth phase require their employees all the way to the founder-CEO to constantly be learning at a really fast pace. In a large megacorp though, it can be really easy to just enjoy the trappings of “success” and let your true measure of career progress stall. Sure, getting promoted to the next level comes with an increased set of responsibilities and skills to learn, but all these companies have “terminal levels” at which people often plateau.
This is why I set learning OKRs for myself every year. Every six months, I check-in with myself on what I learned that half and what I want to learn over the next half. I seek out opportunities that help me learn these things. Sometimes the big learning opportunities take time to find. Be patient but relentless. Set smaller learning goals for yourself in the meantime. Tell your boss what you want to learn next. Often times, your boss might already be doing that and is only too happy for you to take it off their plate. Work for someone who will constantly throw you in at the deep end of the pool, but is still willing to dive in to bail you out if you’re about to drown. And if you’re not being thrown into the deep end of the pool regularly, then consider finding a new pool.
Insightful!