Opening and Closing Doors
There are two phases to your career: when doors open and when they close.
If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!
When you start your career, you are full of potential. When you get hired for a job, the employer can’t look at your experience (you have none) and so they are making a bet on your potential. Maybe you’ll do great things, or maybe you won’t, but it’s worth the risk to find out!
You can think about this phase of your career as a long hallway, lined with doors. Some of those doors open because of your potential, but many are closed.
As your career progresses, you prove yourself good at some things and not good at others. The more you prove, the more opportunities you will get. Maybe you get promoted, or get a chance to move to an entirely new job. Maybe you even start your own business!
More and more of the doors in that hallway are opening up for you. Opportunity abounds! You have both potential and proven skill.
Then, at some point that few of us notice, you aren’t young anymore. You aren’t seen as a person with potential, you are seen as a seasoned operator or leader who is good at specific things. The kinds of opportunities available to you are to do those same things you’ve done, hopefully at larger scales.
The doors in that hallway start closing. Eventually, most of the doors will close.
This is not a commentary on ageism, which exists and is a real problem. This is also not a commentary on changes to your abilities as you get older. This is about how the world sees people with longer and longer resumes. For better or worse, this is the world we are in.
Most of us, myself included, don’t notice the point where you transition from being full of potential to being a proven entity. That moment when the doors start to close passes by while we’re distracted doing other things. It happens slowly at first, and you wouldn’t realize it’s happening unless you were looking very closely.
If we aren’t careful, by the time we notice the doors are closing it can be too late to do anything about it.
Managing your career means ensuring that the right doors are open when you want them. Early in your career this is easy, because doors keep opening up for you. Later in your career this requires planning, because you need to ensure the doors you want stay open while others close. It’s a skill that most of us develop too late.
Luckily, it’s a skill that is easy to develop! Here is what I recommend:
Think about what kinds of jobs you will want in 5-10 years. There might be a wide range, and that’s okay! These might be promotions, different functions or entirely new areas for you.
Talk to people in those jobs, and the people who hired them. Understand what they look for in candidates and what makes the best ones stand out. People are usually happy to talk about themselves and share their experience.
Think about your experience and what gaps exist between what you have and what you need. This requires a lot of humility, admitting that maybe you don’t have skills or experience you need.
Focus on filling those gaps in the coming years!
This is different from the old trope “Where do you see yourself in 5 years” because you might not be sure! You might have a wide range of possibilities ranging from management to individual contributor roles to entirely different professions. While you can’t keep every door open, you can identify the doors you think are important to you and work to keep them open.
Then, you can make the decision whether to use those doors later.
Our careers are made of the years of our lives, and we only have so many. Putting effort into ensuring we can spend the future years of our lives doing the work we want to do sounds simple, but it’s hard to do. The first step is to think about those doors, the ones opening and the ones closing.
For more on Careers and Mental Health, see: