You have two choices: Get career insurance or become irrelevant
Plus: 5 simple ways to go about insuring your own career
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine told me about her boyfriend, a lifer at one of India’s IT service behemoths. He had been there almost 15 years, and was thinking about the future. He felt stuck, my friend said. His salary had remained stagnant for a good while. He had been comfortable, had not really tried to up-skill himself, and not tried to move up the ladder at his own organisation. He had let himself go at a time when the Indian software engineer was more in demand than ever, and let the Indian startup boom pass him by.
Even now, he was thinking about this only when he realised that layoffs were in the offing, and that if let go, it would be very difficult for him to find another job. My friend was worried. He had to do something, late as it was, to resurrect his career, but it was going to be difficult, and age was not on his side.
I kept thinking about this conversation a lot in the weeks after, rolling it around in my head. It terrified me, that someone smart, educated, and employed for such a long time in a booming knowledge economy could find themselves in that position. It showed me, for the first time, how easy it would be to go obsolete.
In 2022, the Indian startup boom of the last decade slowed down. It had been coming a while. With the successes startups had had in the early and mid-2010s, the ecosystem had gone a bit bonkers, betting big on young, hungry founders, and unproven, sometimes over-optimistic business models. The founders and VC firms landed comfortably, of course, failure is written into the way they operate. But one side-effect was that the boom had made salaries skyrocket. I can talk from the marketers’ point of view, I had watched it happen.
Marketers, already slightly rare in India at the early stage, were asking (and getting) ridiculous amounts of money. At one point it became routine to shop for offers, and only agree on something double of what you were making. People moved rapidly around in these boom years, tripling and quadrupling their salaries.
It wasn’t going to last.
When the slowdown came, it hit marketing first, as usual. People were laid off, sometimes entire teams. This process isn’t over, it’s still happening. Marketers are the most vulnerable here, of course - we sometimes tend to believe our own hype. But the same has happened to engineers, sales folks, and other roles that usually wouldn’t be that affected by a slowdown. And with less startups hiring, it’s getting difficult to find jobs, especially for people who have priced themselves out of the market.
Both the above situations suck, and the position both these kinds of employees find themselves in is the same: Stuck, and stuck exactly at the point when their career should be compounding.
As technology employees, we need to think about this seriously. These are our careers, after all, our life’s work.
We need to think about career insurance.
Before I explain what I mean: What is insurance, essentially?
It’s a safeguard against future uncertainty. We are investing in a product, or in some other asset, to make sure we are safe from volatility later. To make sure that life doesn’t surprise us, we are adding stability and financial ballast.
This is what I think we should do for our career as well.
What does that look like? When your career is insured, it means you never have to worry about your next job. It means that if everything goes belly up, you can get your next role quickly. It means that your reputation and connections are so solid that good roles are looking for you even before you are looking for them. It means that your expertise and experience are top of mind for everyone in your industry and you just need to nudge them slightly to get attention.
Okay, how do you get there, though?
First, you need to be clear about your own goals. You have to be sure that the direction you are going in is the one you want, and the one in which you want your career’s compounding to play out in. You can’t insure your career in one field and expect it to help you in another.
Second, unlike life and health insurance, career insurance cannot be bought. It has to be built up.
Here are 5 things you can start doing today to begin building your career insurance:
Networking and joining communities in your field
You will never be known if you do your job well at work and keep to yourself. Being insured also means that a few more people know you, and therefore open up new opportunities. Remember that the best jobs never come up on job or career sites or even LinkedIn. They are snapped up by folks who are better known and better connected.
You have to become them.
How?
By grabbing good opportunities to network among your peer group and helping them when needed. And you don’t need to join everything, you can pick and choose. I’m part of two communities of Indian technology marketers. Everyone I need to know and learn from is already there, I do not need more than that.
Sharing expertise and experience
If you’ve worked for five years at something, you are bound to know something most others don’t. One of the biggest surprises to me when I first started sharing my experience was realising that what I thought was common marketing knowledge was in fact not common at all. There are things you know that no one else knows, and as you share them, people will respond to these learnings, understanding also that you are someone who knows what you are talking about. Like a designer’s portfolio shows how good they are at their craft.
Also, in your early years, be free with your expertise. Help without taking money, do things without expecting something in return. A long time ago, when I was in Pune, a founder wanted me to help with their website copy. It took me a weekend, and I did it with them, for them, and said I didn’t want money. The founder insisted on paying me, and still speaks of how I helped him without thinking of time and money. Remember that your reputation compounds too.
Use social media to your advantage
Social media is your friend. At no other time in the world could you have written, or made a video, or made a graphic about your work and which would find you readers and a following, however modest. Use it. As I’ve talked about before, I can write so I chose to write this newsletter. You do what you do best. And you don’t have to be that consistent or anything. Consistency shouldn’t scare you away.
A friend of mine, a product manager must have written five posts about her work in all her career, but all of them were such super hits that they have been enough for great work and organisations to find her. In fact, I think her reputation came mostly from just one particularly brilliant post of the five. I wrote about her in this essay.
Get yourself a mentor
As a young person, having someone to talk through your challenges, growth issues, and for general career advice is a huge advantage. This is normal in the west, where most executives have a coach to help them navigate high level corporate politics, challenges, and responsibilities. But a mentor need not be that formal. Just someone a few years ahead of you whom you can trust and ask questions of may be good enough. At times, with luck, mentors can be the difference between a good career and a great one.
I have had a mentor for almost 10 years now, and their advice and trust has given me a lot of clarity and confidence, plus opened up a lot of doors that would otherwise have been closed to me.
How to choose a mentor? I spoke about it on The First Two Years, The Ken’s new podcast here.
Over-index on your strengths
This is a no brainer, but needs to be said. As your career grows, you’ll become known for one thing, not three. Answer this question for yourself: What is the thing only I’m good at? You’ll not know the answer to this question in the first two years of your career, but you will know the answer by the next three.
Once you know this, work hard and position yourself to be known for that skill set not just at your workplace, but in your industry. If you become that person everyone knows to ask for help from about that particular topic, then your work is done.
The corollary here, of course, is to stop worrying about things you are not that great at. Work on them enough that these don’t detract you from doing good work, but concentrate on where you know you are exceptional. Being the absolute best at something plays a big part in insuring your career.
I’ve talked about what career insurance is, why it’s important, and how to go about building it for yourself. It’s all there, you just have to go ahead and do it.
Finally, how do you know, after doing all of this, that your career is insured? When you don’t have to apply for jobs. That’s the answer. When you just put the word out, and people who know your strengths want to work with you immediately, when you get access to jobs that are not even on the market, or are just being created for you, that’s when you know your career is insured.
That’s your goal.
Post Script
This is the final essay of four on getting into and building a career in startup marketing.
The first one was about the two books you have to read if you are just starting your career.
The second was about why content is still the easiest way to break into startup marketing.
The third was about 5 things no one tells you about building a (marketing) career.
This essay was due about a month ago, and I apologise. Work has been very busy, and I got caught up. But I hope this essay (and the series) make up for a lean writing phase.
To wrap April up, I have a post coming on some important working principles I wish I knew when starting my career. I took some time thinking about them, eliminating what wasn’t perennial advice, and only keeping what will be immediately useful.
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