Career Pivots

You are never too old

For all the talk of making it happen, there was never any real success in getting out-of-work coal miners to learn how to code. While the coding skillset can be taught (as we demonstrated at General Assembly), the temperament cannot. If you don’t want to sit down in front of a computer for hours at a time playing with math and logic, no class is going to get you to do it.

The good news is that most white collar professionals DO have the temperament to learn new white collar skills. Most will not. Once you are a few years into your career, taking a step back to learn a new function area is not something that many people choose to do.

When I was at P&G 20+ years ago we were told that in order to be a senior leader with the company it was important to do a “rotation” in three function areas: marketing, sales and finance. The company did it’s best to encourage it — if you switched between those roles you did not take a pay-cut to step back in seniority. But the alternative to switching from Assistant Brand Manager (marketing) to Account Manager (sales) usually wasn’t pay-parity. The people who instead charged ahead in marketing would not be far from being Brand Managers. It takes a very special kind of ambitious 25-year old to choose not to be promoted with their peers in order to develop more breadth.

Now, 20 year later, many of my incoming P&G cohort are very successful. I don’t think any of them actually did that rotation. The ones that stuck with P&G shifted into marketing and moved up the ladder as fast as possible (usually with international assignments). So while “breadth” sounds good, I am not fully convinced it really is that way to accelerate a career - even in the later stages.

What does work is to push hard in one direction while building relationships with your peers such that when a promotion is possible you know enough about the areas you were NOT responsible for that you are able to manage those areas. I never ran paid search or SEO or brand marketing. I ran CRM, loyalty and email marketing — but I spent enough time with the people running SEM and SEO and TV, that I was able to oversee all the channels as a CMO.

In the years since I have had opportunities to become CEO, and I did it without ever having a rotation in finance or product or technology. I know just enough to be dangerous and know what good looks like.

Now is the time

Shawn Wang wrote an essay last week, “You are not too old to pivot to AI”. He writes about his two significant career pivots. The first was when he was in his early thirties and he switched from finance to software engineering. That’s a big switch. I would not recommend it if your goal is “career advancement”, but it sounds like for Shawm the driver was that he did not want to do finance. That is reason enough, and in the last 6-7 years he has proven that it’s never too late (or at least it is not too late in your early 30s).

Now he is doing his second career pivot: From traditional developer to AI. He writes:

6-7 years later, I am again pivoting my career. I think a SWE → AI pivot is almost as much of a pivot as going from Finance → SWE, just in terms of superficial similarity while also requiring tremendous amount of new knowledge and practical experience in order to get reasonably productive. My pivot strategy follows the same playbook as last time; study nights and weekends as much as possible for 6 months to get confidence that this is a lasting interest where I can make meaningful progress, then cut ties/burn bridges/go all in and learn it in public.

But that’s just what works for me; your situation will be different. I trust that you can figure out the how if you wished; I write for the people who are looking to get enough confidence about their why that they actually decide to take the leap.

Clearly I believe that generative AI is going to change everything and is very important for anyone at any point in their career. I do NOT think that means everyone needs to spend the next six months studying nights and weekends to become machine learning engineers. I’m not saying you should NOT do that, but I don’t think it is necessary - the same way I don’t think it was necessary for every business executive in 1994 to drop everything and become a front-end developer.

But I DO think that everyone should be looking at ways to use the new AI tools on their job.

AI is NOT going to take away everyone’s job, but I do think that people using AI are going to rapidly start taking away the jobs from people who are not using AI.

Shawn lists a number of reasons why ramping up in AI is not as difficult as it might seem - nor as difficult as ramping up in other fields would be. AI really only has 5 years of “history” to learn about. He gives a half-dozen examples of people who have done it and how it is done. Do read the whole post. In conclusion:

More broadly, the way that both incumbents are startups across every vertical and market segment are embracing AI is showing us that the future is “AI-infused everything” - therefore understanding foundation models will more likely be a means to an end (making use of them) rather an end in itself (training them, or philosophizing about safety and sentience). Perhaps it might be better to think of yourself and your potential future direction less like “pivoting INTO AI”, and rather “learning how to make use of it” in domains you’re already interested or proficient in.

And I think this quote is important: “Are you working on anything nearly as challenging as understanding how AI works, and figuring out what you can do with it?”

Keep it simple,

Edward