The shape of your career

If you design your career thoughtfully, you can escape the tyranny of time, writes Pavan Soni

One of the vital career questions is: Should I be a specialist or a generalist? As much as I loathe using the phrase, I would still go with ‘it depends’! It depends on the stage of your career. More than your industry, company, or role, it is the stage of your life and career determining whether you must strive to be an expert or remain a generalist. Both have merit, but you must pace it well.

The foremost nudge is for you to appreciate that careers have evolved. As people are blessed with longer lives, they retire from active work later, exercising both formal and informal employment means. So, you can look at a career span between 40 and 50 years. That’s a huge time, dwarfing the lifetimes of those who lived just a few centuries earlier, amid the most developed settings. Now that we understand that we indeed have time, it’s critical to pace it nicely, instead of rushing through the endeavour called career. 

Think of an hourglass-shaped career—broad at the top and bottom and narrow right in the middle. A well-crafted career starts with a broad and deliberate sampling period where you maintain a generalist disposition, before doubling down on specific domains or skills, and towards the later phase, broadening once again to deliver impact or perhaps pivoting.

What qualifies for a good education? The one that broadens your employment options or narrows those down? I presume it’s the former. However, all our educational efforts are focused on the latter. We are spiralling into hyper-specialisation, a sort of academic inflation, where jobs that sought graduates are now keen on post-graduates and even some more, in the form of degrees and certificates.

Ergo, students are looking for that ‘exact’ match with their theoretical qualifications, eventually getting into another spiral of learning and amassing relevant certifications, fashionably called ‘un-learning’. That wasn’t the case as recently as three decades ago when we created and valued broad-skilled talent.

It’s a good idea to think of your career in three distinct phases, akin to the four phases of life recommended in Indian theology. Here are the three phases of your career. 

Start with a broad and elongated sampling period: When you start your career, you must give yourself sufficient time to sample various fields, industries, job profiles and tasks until you find your resonant frequency. You might appear confused, but it’s okay. After all, a decent sampling period lowers your guilt of not trying enough and regret of being stuck in a dreaded role. A sampling period of around a decade, where you hop between projects, is a good idea. Why projects? Because they have a definitive scope and a success criterion. You move from one project to another, while not being too sensitive to the industry or the role. A longer sampling period helps you also be ready for entrepreneurship. 

Spend the mid-career specialising and solving complex problems: Once you have seen it enough and identified the one or two domains that excite you and are clearer about the race you wish to run, you go deeper into a narrower field. This is where you develop credibility. You become the go-to person for specific domains. But how do you ensure that you are not specialising in a field that’s fleeting? How do you keep yourself relevant for the long haul?

That’s through the extensive sampling period. Since you did hop across fields, much to the chagrin of your HR, you have a better chance of distilling the signal from the noise. You wouldn’t be committed to a false start, and the sampling period would also allow you to pivot lest you do. Being a specialist helps you contribute to the body of knowledge and expertise in your chosen domain, and you have a shot at being known in the field of your liking. After all, you didn’t land at it accidentally. 

The final act: a generalist and leadership material: As you approach the last decade of your career, you once again dislodge your anchor and float–this time to the broader ocean. The risk of excessive specialisation is eventual irrelevance. All fields either disintegrate into narrow specialisations, just like the fragmentation of physics from Newton to the CERN, or they become obsolete, akin to the ace horse carriage drivers. By deliberately looking beyond your narrow milieu, you can create another career trajectory, most likely, this time as an entrepreneur. Or, at least, you give a chance to people below you to grow and step into your shoes. 

That’s your hourglass career. It’s what Einstein did: Starting as a physics student, specialising in quantum mechanics and relativity, and finally becoming a humanist. Ditto with Kalam, who began as a curious science student, before becoming the Missile Man of India, eventually sparking curious minds well into his last days.

Your career is probably the greatest vehicle of impact, and if you design it more thoughtfully, you can escape the tyranny of time, for you planned it like an hourglass. I hope you are at it.