Early Career Decisions That Shape Career Paths

One of my coaching clients just called me with a career dilemma. "Marcus, I have three offers on the table. One pays $25K more than the others. It's a no brainer, right?" Wrong. Over the last decade, I've watched too many sales professionals chase the highest initial offer only to burn out, get laid off, or quit within 12 months. Why? Because they never looked at the full picture. Here's the exact decision framework I shared with him (and use myself): 1️⃣ Leadership Quality: Will your direct boss push you to grow? Will they advocate for you? Will they teach you? The quality of your leader will impact your career trajectory more than any other factor. 2️⃣ Company Trajectory: Is this company on the way up or down? What's their financial position? What's their reputation in the market? A 10% pay bump means nothing if the company does layoffs in 6 months. 3️⃣ Values Alignment: Can you authentically represent this company? Do they make decisions you respect? Will you be proud to tell people where you work? 4️⃣ Growth Ceiling: What's the highest position you could realistically achieve at this company? What skills will you develop? How marketable will you be in 3 years? 5️⃣ Work-Life Integration: Will this role support the life you want to build? Will it demand 80-hour weeks? Will it require constant travel? My client ended up taking the middle offer ($150K) because the leadership was elite, the company was growing 70% YoY, and the path to director was clear. The right career decisions compound over time. $25K might seem like a lot today, but the right leadership, skills, and trajectory can be worth millions over your career. Make decisions with the long term in mind. — Hey sales pro…are you prepping for a job interview? Lemme help you: https://lnkd.in/gQvZJZsk

You are better off being in the 60th percentile at a high-growth company than in the 99th percentile in a low-growth environment. When a company is growing fast, opportunity comes to you. When it’s not, you spend time trying to force it. Early in my career, I worked for Procter & Gamble. It was a great company with talented leaders, but it wasn’t growing. I worked hard and earned strong feedback, but advancement was measured in decades and it was nearly impossible to contribute to the top or bottom line. Working for a well-run, large company like that is a great way to develop management best practices. It is also the best way to learn how to run and operate a great company. However, large, low-growth companies have far fewer problems and opportunities than high-growth companies. So, it doesn’t really matter how good you are; if opportunities and problems are scarce, you can’t produce much impact. Despite everyone’s good intentions, advancement is slow, and the system rewards those who have the right relationships, not those who are driving outcomes (because there are fewer outcomes to be driven). Scott Galloway once said that people unknowingly stack the odds against themselves by staying in low-growth environments. This is what I was doing at the beginning of my career. Moving to Seattle and joining a fast-growing e-commerce company (Amazon) was the best career move I could have made. It was an early-stage, high-growth company— problems and opportunities were everywhere! One of our biggest problems was deciding which problems and opportunities to tackle first and finding capable leaders to own them. If you focused on the right ones and executed well, big, meaningful results followed. At Amazon, in the Seattle HQ, I was in an environment where I had the opportunity to deliver big results. It required working hard and smart, but delivering results that could lead to rapid promotion was possible. It also meant that promotions were as apolitical as you could ask for in a large company because your results could be measured objectively. I experienced what Scott Galloway points out— you can stack the odds in your favor for career growth by orienting your career around industries, cities, and companies that are fast growing. If you find an opportunity to join a fast-growing company, in a high-growth sector in a growing city, take it.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make early in their career is what I like to call “the Salary Trap.” Let’s say you have two job offers on the table. - Job A is for $60,000 at a fast-growing company - Job B is for $90,000 at a slow-growth company Which one should you pick? 99% of people would say Job B. On the surface it’s obvious - it’s almost 50% higher pay than Job A. When you’re 25 years old, that’s super attractive. I would take the other side of the bet. Early in your career, salary is one of the least important factors you should consider. In fact, I’ll go one step further to say the worst thing you can do early in your career is take a job that pays 50% more, but where you will learn 80% less. Every job in the world is on a spectrum. On the left hand side of the spectrum you have *inputs* and on the right hand side of the spectrum you have *outputs*. Compensation is very predictable on this spectrum; it is the lowest on the left hand side of the spectrum (e.g. for jobs that are based on inputs) and the highest on the right hand side of the spectrum (e.g. for jobs that are based on outputs). Intuitively this makes sense; this spectrum is another way to frame seniority. The more senior you are in an organization, the more your compensation skews to the right hand side of the spectrum. Why? Because ultimately, the market doesn’t care about how hard you work; it cares about what you produce. You are rewarded (or punished) based on your business performance. It’s why the rewards are most significant for those that are most senior. If you believe in this premise - that higher earning potential compensation is tied to outputs - you should ask: “How do I get into a senior level role as fast as possible?” Easy: By learning. Early in your career, you can focus on “learning” or you can focus on “earning” - they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in many cases they are. Early in your career, pick the job where the learning velocity is steep. You will sacrifice short term compensation ($30k in this case) for long term rewards. It’s important to note, the sacrifice is not 1:1; it’s more like 1:10. When your learning curve is flat, your earning curve is flat. When your learning curve is steep, your earning curve is steep. If you have a shallow learning curve early in your career, you will be pegged to the *input* curve. The more time that passes, the more difficult it becomes to escape this curve. If you’re early in your career, try to singularly focus on your learning curve. Before you know it, the earning curve will reward you handsomely.