Name: Your Career Path Doesn't Have to Be a Straight Line
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 6 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When I say career development, what do you think?

Present continuous

You're probably thinking of something like a ladder or something that is very linear.

And that's pretty much what we've been taught for a very long time.

For me, I actually think there's a different way to think about this.

I think the right analogy is career development as a rock wall.

How do you get on the wall and just get started?

A laddar. There's really only one kind of direction that you can go, and that's either up or down.

But it can't just be that there is one path and one way to find success,

and navigate your way throughout an organization in order to feel like you're successful.

Essentially, what we want are options and opportunities to define what success looks like for us.

When we think about the rock wall, success may mean moving out, right?

Broadening your scope, not necessarily moving up in terms of leadership.

Success may look like, hey, I'm going to take a little bit of a step back.

Maybe it looks like actually moving something off of your plate.

How can we make sure that all of those pieces fit together

to say there are lots of opportunities here up and along this wall and different paths that folks are on?

And that's okay. We can all be on this wall at the same time.

You may be sitting there and in your mind staring up at this rock wall going, how do I tackle this?

I know that I have certainly been there many points in my career and actually standing in front of rock walls.

For me, and again, in this analogy, going up the wall,

I know that the lane that's going to be easiest for me is the one that allows me to power up using my leg strength.

The second that I need to use my arms, forget it.

I am not going to successfully navigate it.

Now translate that to what your strengths and your opportunity areas are.

Maybe I've been in the workforce for a while and I have a really strong sense of where I know I knock it out of the park,

and the places where I know I don't like to spend a lot of time there because it's not a natural strength of mine.

And then look again at what are the opportunities that are in front of me.

Ideally, if we're thinking growth mindset, if we're thinking strength-based leadership,

then what we're saying is we want you to play to your strengths.

And as your manager, they're down here looking out for those opportunity areas for you,

but you're just allowed to use your strengths to navigate your way up and around that wall.

If you don't know your strengths, maybe you're a little bit newer to the workforce,

or you're in a completely new lane that you haven't navigated before.

You can kind of think about how kids naturally go up the wall, which is not necessarily looking for one route in particular.

Just looking for what's the easiest way for me to get started.

And to start to figure out what does this feel like to navigate my way up here.

And as you start to move up, you might realize, actually, it makes more sense for me to move out a little bit.

And when I move out, I'm actually really strong over here.

When I need to move up, I've got some opportunity areas here.

What do you think about working on those opportunity areas will help you to achieve your goals?

And how can we make sure that you can do that in a psychologically safe environment where it's okay for you to fail?

all right, I'm excited about this challenge that sits in front of me now

because I have an understanding about how I tackle this in the first place.

Some of this development might look like a step back.

sometimes as I'm making my way up the path, there are some sections where I'm going a little bit faster.

And then I would pause and I would go, nope, I missed something.

But when you're backtracking, you have an opportunity to see a slightly different route,

In my own career, I have certainly decided to take a step to the side, a step back and down.

I had done some amazing things, had an opportunity to open new offices in the first office for diversity and Multicultural affairs,

and really get into some work that started for me aligning what I ultimately wanted to do with what I believed to be possible.

At the same time, I realized there were skill sets that I was missing that I knew if I had those, that I could be even better in my role.

It was a hard decision to make, for sure,

but ultimately, the right one to say, I'm actually going to move into another industry to work on that skill set,

to make it a strength of mine to say, I'm going to do facilitation full-time.

But because I hadn't done that before, you know, technically, on paper, it looked like a step down.

But for me, I knew I was just trying to add to my toolkit to be able to get up that wall.

And actually a bit back on that path that I was just a little further along it.

There are lots of ways to kind of define success in your career.

It could be simply taking on more scope or stepping into a space that you haven't occupied before.

We hear it a lot in the tech space as well.

I want to be the best engineer that I can be and I don't necessarily want to manage people.

That doesn't mean that you don't care about the organization,

but it also shouldn't limit the career success that you can have.

It has pushed a lot of organizations to consider, well, what is up and is it actually out?

That then allows us to say this is the equivalent of this.

If success was you go from being an individual contributor to managing one person, to managing a team, to managing a department,

can we kind of scope a parallel path for an individual contributor that's "I go from managing my work" to "I go to managing a set of projects,"

to "I go to managing a set of key initiatives" that allows for folks to kind of see that scope growth in a very similar way,

and allows for us to say, yes, you are taking on more.

And therefore we can recognize this career ascension that doesn't look exactly the same as it does over here.

The rock wall analogy allows for folks to step outside of some of the more traditional landscape,

step outside of some of the more boxed in feeling that we tend to have around what does success look like and how can I define that success?

And it allows us to get a little bit more creative in thinking about, hey, actually,

if I define success like X, then here is how I can make that happen.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Your Career Path Doesn't Have to Be a Straight Line

ultimately

essentially

equivalent

approach