Career Planning in Your Early 30s Doesn't Have to Be Terrifying
The Questions of the Haunted Thirtysomething
Your twenties are over, and it's time to get serious. To keep up with your peers, you need to stop guessing and optimize your talents. What's your next move, and how do you set yourself up for the future you want?
These are the questions facing the 23 million Americans in their early 30s. If you're among them, you're part of the biggest five-year cohort in the country. That means whatever career change you're considering, millions of others are making similar choices.
That might feel scary, but don't panic! In front of you lies a field of opportunities, and you've got some advantages. You're more mature than you were, for one thing, and your horizon is sharper. By this point, you've probably learned that every decision doesn't lock you into something for "the rest of your life" — whatever that means.
That said, one day you will be 45. Where will you be? Who will you be? You've got plenty of lives left in this game, but they're limited, so you have to be smart about how you use them.
How Do You Evaluate Your Situation?
The first step of smart decision making is identifying the problem or challenge. Fortunately, in your early thirties, reference points are all around you… literally.
On one side, you see recent graduates entering the workforce with the latest skills and all their fresh, naïve energy. On the other side, you see your older coworkers and friends running into walls and running out of time.
Among your peers and former classmates, differences in the outcomes of their decisions are starting to show in a big way. Some of them have been riding along in the same rut for years. Some of them are still bouncing from one job to another. Some are comfortable with their pay; some are enjoying their sense of purpose. And then there are those who are just crushing it, winning at the game of life.
Of course, the evaluation has multiple sides, too. For all their variety of career outcomes, your peers probably have the same variety in their choices (or more) when it comes to family, lifestyle, and the legacies they're building for themselves.
The challenge is to make the next move count. You have to learn something, prove something, and position yourself for whatever comes next. Your résumé shows you where you've been, but you need to figure out where you're going.
Do You Have Skill Gaps and Rungs Missing from Your Career Ladder?
The scariest and most-complicating factor is the massive technological change that has already started with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Just as you're plotting your course from rung to rung on a mid-career ladder, technology is threatening to remove the rungs of jobs that human beings will no longer have to do.
Complicating the planning of people in their early 30s is the question of which rungs are likely to disappear. One Wharton School study suggests AI will have the biggest impact on jobs around the 80th income percentile. This is likely to be the ground you're hoping to cross in the next 10 years.
On the positive side, AI is expected to add nearly two jobs for each one it takes away. If you're in the "get serious" phase of your career, you may be ideally positioned to apply the workplace lessons you've already learned to the reimagined workplace that is soon to be.
Your skill gap analysis must therefore consider:
- Which ladder you want to be on,
- What skills you'll need to climb higher,
- What rungs will still be there when you reach for them.
Do Soft Skills Count Without Hard Proof?
One typical answer to the skill-gap problem is "soft skills" like communication, teamwork, and leadership, but these words aren't magic.
As potential employers see them proclaimed on every résumé, hiring managers are becoming skillful, themselves, at spotting when such concepts are being attached to any activity that might somehow be related. Yes, your skills — rather than jobs you've had — are becoming the "currency of the workforce."
But until skills can be reliably verified, employers will continue to hedge their bets with tried-and-true résumé items like job titles and references. For professionals trying to establish themselves in their mid-careers, claiming to "be good with people" won't cut it.
The ever-expanding sea of certifications might be helpful, but they're insufficient. Verifying your skills will require you to piece together self-motivated projects, side gigs, and volunteer work. And all of them must fit precisely where the traditional rungs are missing from the ladder you want to climb.
Is There a Dynamic GPS for Your Career?
On first glance, this description of what you need to do as you stare down the slope toward middle age probably increases your anxiety rather than relieving it. You have to:
- Form a long-term idea of where you want to be in 10 or 15 years across every aspect of your life
- Plot your next step in a way that counts
- Improvise ways to make your existing and new skills tangible and verifiable
With this list of musts, even a great (and expensive) personal career coach would be too limited by his or her own experience and imagination. Your path must be as individualized as you are.
What if you could tell your résumé where you aspire to go, and it would reply to tell you what it's missing? This is what SkillDrift does, delivering clarity and sophisticated insights with which you can interact, developed specifically to be smart about careers. To help your decision-making, you upload your résumé and explain where you'd like to go, and SkillDrift provides concrete actions you can take to develop skills and prove them.
Its personalized dashboard offers a private space to explore your options, admit your fears, and confess your ambitions. Its AI works with you to test and explore your aspirations. Most importantly, the plan can adjust as quickly and as frequently as you do, analyzing what is still relevant and suggesting what should come next — including ways in which to verify your skills for your future employers.
Thinking about "the future you" can be scary, but people at the crossroads of their early 30s still have time to plan if they start now. What you need is a map — more like a GPS — that can guide you to your goals even if you make mistakes or take detours and even if rungs disappear just before you can reach them.
SkillDrift's personalized guidance maps the skills you need from the résumé you have to the future you want.