Let's talk about designing a career roadmap and acquiring necessary skills
a) Less than 3 years of working experience:
- Test as much as you can to explore what you like and don't like
- Learn fast, fail fast and repeat the cycle
- Find a great mentor and manager at work and ideally a team with a good culture that will nurture your growth
- Personally, I prefer a well structured environment when starting out as I want to get top notch trainings, learn best practices and work with talented people.
b) From 3-7 years of working experience:
- Decide if you want to become an industry expert (go deep) or become a people manager/leader (go broad) or even become a business owner (do everything).
From that you can think of what skills you need to acquire to reach your goal.
I want to share a concept of "T-shaped skills" that is a reference to qualities that make an employee valuable. McKinsey & Company provided a great summary of it (photo attached):
"A T-shaped skills profile" is "a broad set of generally applicable skills, supplemented by a spike of specific expertise".
1. Acquire skills = Build your skills blocks: Earned from things that you are working on or from your past experience. They can be functional skills, industry specific skills and personal skills.
2. Breadth of essential kills: Fill your skills blocks in the set of "essential skills" aka "the stuff everyone should know".
3. Depth of expertise: Select skills blocks that you want to move down the T; developing from basic to mastery level. That's how you build your domain expertise.
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In the context of marketing:
If you want to go broad like being people manager, you need to acquire more people-related skills like communications, managing up and down, executive presence, motivating others, growing talents, visioning and strategy, budget allocation and more. In addition, you will need to have a broader knowledge across different platforms, manage multi-channel marketing strategy and connect product strategy with end users.
If you want to go deep, then pick one or two specializations and excel the relevant skills and knowledge required for them. Examples of marketing specializations can be:
1. Product marketing
2. Growth marketing
3. Platform marketing
4. Brand marketing
Check out other posts I wrote about career here.
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