Career Boosts

Is your job still a good fit?

No matter how long you’ve been in your career, knowing the answer to that question can be tricky. But a surprising clarity happens if you look back at the last six months and ask yourself: 

1. Am I still growing in my job?
    
2. Have I learned anything new about working with other people?
    
3. Have I learned anything new about the work I do?

If you struggled with those questions, it may be time to take a hard look at why. 

“A lot of times, people don’t really own their careers,” says Hoyt Ng, executive director of coaching and programming for the MBA Career Management Group (CMG). “They go with the flow until they’re forced to make a change.”

Amid a volatile job market made more turbulent by everything from AI disruption to political swings, a growing number of Haas alumni find themselves grappling with career changes, whether due to layoffs, transitions, or life events such as retirement. 

Scott Jones, EMBA 25, is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, a captain with United Airlines, and a leadership coach who came to Haas at age 60 to explore how to turn his life experiences into a service-oriented impact business. “The biggest question anybody asks is, ‘What’s next?’” Jones says.

Rather than being forced to pivot at an inflection point, Jones and others are learning to come from a place of power through the proactive process of career development—gaining new skills, knowledge, and experiences as well as taking strategic actions to stay relevant and reach long-term career goals. 

In contrast to a traditional path of promotions or pivots, career development is more akin to launching a startup. Just as entrepreneurs must know the marketplace, define their value propositions, and establish their brand, career development employs similar strategies for more success and fulfillment no matter where you’re at on your career path. The key is to be continuously learning and adapting to changes in the market.

Define your value prop

From the standpoint of career development, the first thing to learn is what you really want to do. It may sound obvious, but one of the biggest mistakes people make, especially early in their career, is not fully understanding what role they want or how to align their values with their work—the equivalent of launching a startup without first defining the value proposition.

Just ask Minnie Fong, MBA 13, director of strategic finance & analytics for Airbnb. “I always encourage people to find the intersection of their strengths, passions, and desired impact,” says Fong. “You might hear that you’d excel in a particular field, but without the necessary skills and genuine enthusiasm, you’ll find yourself struggling in a role that isn’t truly aligned with who you are.” 

Fong acknowledges, though, that sometimes the only way to gain that understanding is through job experience and deep personal reflection. That’s how she evolved her career aspirations to focus on roles and challenges that move her closer to becoming a more strategic operator. 

“Through many years of reflection, I came to realize that I am the strategic executor—the person leaders turn to when they need to transform ambitious ideas into reality.” Fong says. “That realization became my North Star.”

CMG’s Ng says many lack that North Star because they think they know themselves and what job position would be a good fit without trying it or fully understanding what the work entails. 

“A lot of people want to sit down and say, ‘Well, I like influencing people, so maybe I’d like to be a product manager.’ And they don’t actually know what in the world a PM does,” he says. “Confidence Without Attitude is about looking at real data about yourself.”

Without that clarity, it’s easy to get pulled in the wrong direction and make decisions for the wrong reasons, including money, fear, and general complacency, Ng says. 

“Once you get into a job, you get comfortable. Things might not be perfect, or you might even be really unhappy. But you know what? That paycheck is looking good,” he says. “So, because of convenience and basic survival, we don’t think about our careers. We trust the manager, or we trust the process. And we go on autopilot.” 

Build your BoD

The best way to avoid that autopilot scenario is the equivalent of a startup building a board of directors and creating a strong investor network. The Haas community of alumni and academics is a great place to find the career version—mentors who want to invest in you. But it’s also important to cultivate advisors or coaches within your professional community. 

Naveed Bin Anwar, EMBA 26, vice president of Genpact, came to Haas to transition from a long-term consulting career to a more entrepreneurial role. “Mentorship is needed at all levels,” says Bin Anwar. “Even if you’re president of the United States, you still need mentorship and coaching.” 

Recently, one of Bin Anwar’s mentors helped him decide not to take a job at a new company, and several weeks later that company went under. “So, your advisor network is super important,” he says. 

Building that network means, well, networking. But not the kind many expect. In fact, in the beginning, it’s best to network with the intention of exploring and discussing roles you might be interested in rather than a particular outcome. “Most people think they have to network and that networking will lead to the job or the recommendation. And then people complain that they don’t like networking because it’s transactional,” Ng says.  

Instead of being transactional, career development networking is intentional, educational, and genuine. Airline pilot Jones, who is currently building his network as he contemplates launching a new leadership development company, likens it to simply being helpful to others. 

“In a community, everybody has a way they can contribute,” he says. “What I’m learning through Haas are frameworks to combine deep expertise with service and how I can apply my expertise in a way that’s authentic. It doesn’t have to be transactional.”

Launch your product

Once you’ve defined your value proposition and built your network, it’s time to launch. As with any good startup, this is when you convince the market to buy your product. In practice, that means finding and demonstrating why you’re right for a particular role. These conversations are still in the family of networking, but they’re more about communicating your worth beyond credentials or experience. 

“One of the ways a candidate can stand out in a job search is to show that they know a lot about the organization and that they’ve thought deeply about how they can add value,” says Abby Scott, assistant dean of CMG and corporate partnerships.

Scott adds that an important step in this process is customizing your career story to show how your skills and experience fit with the company. “This requires deep research so you understand the big challenges the company faces and the growth areas—then really being thoughtful about how your background and skill set applies directly to help solve those problems,” she says.

That’s exactly what Shruthi Narasimhan, MBA 25, did when she came to Haas to transform her food science background into a consulting career to help food businesses operate more sustainably.

“My profile was so different from what a typical consultant’s profile looks like. I had no finance background. I had no econ. I was a hard STEM major,” she says. But after working with her Haas “career family”—peer advisors, alumni, career coach, and relationship manager—Narasimhan molded her previous work as a food scientist into a new career story that landed her a job she thought was out of reach: a consulting role at McKinsey. 

Adapt and grow

While landing the job is rewarding, career development doesn’t end there. In fact, just like a startup, the product launch is just the beginning. “Startups reinvent and reinvest continuously,” Bin Anwar says. “That means new certifications, finding new mentors, or reaching out to new networking opportunities.”

In career development, that process is generally called upskilling, says CMG’s Ng. “Upskilling is a part of learning agility, and people who have these capabilities of constantly learning, constantly developing, tend to do better in upturns and downturns,” he says. “It’s really a key part of staying relevant in the marketplace. You never want to be the taxi drivers to Uber.”

AI is an example of a great upskilling opportunity. “A lot of people have fears around AI,” Ng says. “But I always encourage people to go use it. Because in an interview, they’re going to ask you, ‘How would you use AI?’ And you want to speak to it intelligently and through experience. You don’t want to speak about it theoretically.”

Often the key to career development is simply trying new things with an eye toward discovering new abilities and aspects of yourself. “You’ll never know what you want or enjoy doing until you actually experience it,” says Fong, whose career path has been a series of learning experiences that ultimately led her to where she is today—and where she’ll go tomorrow. 

“It’s just investing in yourself,” she says, “and seeing where you can continue to learn and grow to get you closer to your goals.”