Diving in When the Career Dues Are Paid
Escape into the Maze
In your mid-to-late twenties, you're through the door to adulthood. Now you have to figure out how to earn a living doing something meaningful for the biggest portion of your life.
When you stepped away from youth and the structured course of education, people said you could go anywhere and do anything. Now you're finding it only seems that way because the walls are invisible. A career can be a maze in which you only know you've hit a dead end because your nose crushes against it.
The good news is you've got a lot of options and a lot of time to explore. Whatever direction you go, you'll start to build experience and pay your dues. That sounds manageable, right?
So why do you worry you're headed in the wrong direction --- and feel like you have to hurry? Did we mention this maze has a monster?
The Monster of Choices, Expectations, and Standard Ways of Doing Things
Everybody's got advice, and they usually can't separate it from their own incentives and blind spots. Your family's guidance is probably intended for your benefit, but it might be tainted by hope you'll live nearby or choose a particular lifestyle.
Your employer's suggestions may come in the form of a standard career path you can follow. But your manager will be more concerned about getting you to help with what FranklinCovey calls a "whirlwind" of urgent daily tasks that interferes with the company's Wildly Important Goals and yours.
Résumé services and career guidebooks can be useful, but too narrowly focused. System-selling life-hack podcasters sound like they've got some answers, but their solutions may only work for people just like them.
Some sources will tell you to "optimize everything." Others will insist on personal key performance indicators (KPIs). But which method should you choose, and what should you measure, anyway?
Meanwhile, your friends and peers keep posting on their social profiles, making you feel a need to keep up.
Each of these ideas, reminders, to-dos, and self-comparisons goes on a mental sticky note. Over time, they take on a life of their own, forming a monster that tangles your thinking and chases you through the maze.
Making Your Dues Transferable
In recent years, reports have found young adults questioning inherited beliefs about the fairness of "paying your dues." Some see it as "hazing." This choice of words is important, because it puts the emphasis not on the grunt work they're being asked to do, but on the sense that it's an arbitrary test of endurance.
In other words, employees in their twenties don't object to paying their dues if they see progress. After all, they went through high school, college, trade school, and minimum-wage jobs!
At this point, they just want to be taken seriously as adults and to be sure the payoff is eventually on the calendar. Unless they're lucky enough to be on a path that excites them, they'll also want their dues to be transferable if they decide to make jumps in the future.
Articles often define "transferable skills" as generic habits and abilities. One framework places skills in a pyramid:
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Basic skills are the activities and knowledge people need to function in the world, like literacy and numeracy.
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Essential skills, such as communication and time management, intertwine with personal character and attitude and are foundational for work in general.
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Technical skills are specific to a job, company, industry, or discipline.
The lesson from this approach is often to focus on the basic and essential until you're sure what technical skills you'll really need. For instance, knowing how to put numbers in an ancient software system your quirky and grumpy boss still uses is not likely to transfer somewhere else. On the other hand, knowing how to manage quirky, grumpy people probably will.
While helpful, this perspective is unnecessarily limited. Greater opportunities exist to pay your dues in ways you can carry wherever you choose to go:
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Research finds that about half the activities performed in low-wage work are also needed in higher-paying jobs, which implies a need to identify the important half.
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Analysis of skill portfolios has captured a nested hierarchy in which some skills open more doors than others and are therefore associated with higher wages.
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Other research suggests task-specific human capital accounts for a large portion of a person's income growth, which means finding tasks that are similar across jobs, even where the occupations are very different.
In summary, wherever you find yourself now and wherever you hope to go next, you can identify foundational skills you're developing on the job and complementary skills you can learn and put them together to escape the sticky-note monster. This is the winning formula for early-career planning in an economy where job paths are no longer linear.
A Large Skill Model (LSM) for Your Career
Making these connections is becoming easier with advances in technology. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are the most-familiar forms of artificial intelligence (AI), and they work by modeling the connections embedded in a mountain of texts.
Imagine a three-dimensional connect-the-dots puzzle. Every idea creates a shape of connected lines from dot to dot. When a user asks a question, the LLM matches it to the shapes in its training data and fills in the missing connections.
This same kind of pattern-recognition can be applied to skills, tasks, and career paths. You can think of tools like SkillDrift as "large skill models (LSMs)." With fine-tuned systems to assess the tasks and skills associated with jobs, LSMs can provide AI-driven career guidance to map a path to your goals and dreams.
They not only identify activities that bridge where you are to where you want to be; they also recognize when foundational skills you've developed on the job have similar shapes to skills on which your future employers will place high value. Then they help you connect the dots to courses and résumé builders that will fill out the model.
The monster is still going to chase you --- we can't do anything about that --- but we can help you stay ahead of it. Starting with your résumé and looking toward your goals, SkillDrift reveals gateways through the invisible barriers. You can still take advice from family and gurus if you want, but with career guidance from SkillDrift, you remain in control.