A career is a marathon, not a sprint.
We want our careers to move at the speed of light. We want promotions, more leadership responsibility, and higher salaries, but these cannot all happen overnight. We need to invest time in building up a foundation for our future.
Ironically, investing the time to build up these skills and experiences has turned out to be the easy part. Once we build up that foundation, we need to then figure out the best way to connect our experiences and market this marathon-of-a-career to position ourselves for the end-game role we aspire to hold.
When you are only five years into your career, it is easy to market and convey the things you bring to the table, but when you are 20 years into your career and have made many twists and turns across multiple companies, it is much more difficult to show the full scope of value you can bring.
So once you’re deep into the marathon, how do you market your career?
Find Subtle Ways to Make Your Credentials Known
I’ve worked with people for years before finding out they had a Ph.D. Some might consider this a humble and honorable trait, but there is a fine line between being humble and inadequately marketing yourself.
You don’t want to be that colleague who is constantly referring to the ivy league school they attended 25 years ago, but you do want to showcase that you are an expert with respected credentials in your industry.
You should make sure your credentials are listed front-and-center on LinkedIn, along with actively posting content that is related to your level of expertise. Another way is telling funny stories about yourself from that time of your life when you were getting the credential, but do not make the credential the focus of the story.
For example, I talk about how the first time I drank coffee was when I volunteered to teach fourth grade electricity once. The joke is always that it wasn’t electrical engineering that made me need coffee, but managing 30 kids in the classroom.
Finding the right way to market your credentials and experiences will help ensure the leaders of your organization know that you are qualified to take on new and exciting opportunities that are needed for you to reach the next mile in your marathon.
Ensure That Your Resume Tells a Story
As you get farther along in the marathon, telling a story with your resume becomes more important. If you’ve worked with five or more companies, that story gets more complex to tell. Employers start having to do math to calculate years of experience or scale of program management.
To mitigate this, in the skills section of my resume, I like to list something like “10+ years of experience managing multi-million-dollar projects and teams of five to 10 people across the manufacturing, finance and artificial intelligence industries.”
As I mentioned, a potential employer could do this math, but why leave any room for guessing? You should use the skills section of your resume to tell them the executive summary of the story they will find if they keep reading.
Be Picky About Your Career Moves
Being picky when making career moves might not sound like marketing, but it is the foundation you build your marketing on.
For example, if I wanted my next career move to be in an engineering role to develop new chip technologies, I would receive zero invitations to interview because I have not set myself up for that role or that industry.
Each step you take in the marathon-of-your-career needs to be a part of your story. It is better to hold out for a job you know will put you on the path towards your dream job, than take the first job that comes your way. This will make marketing your career much easier when you can easily draw the connection between each move you made, and how it set you up for the role you aspire to have.
As I said, investing the time to build up skills and experiences is the easiest part of your marathon-of-a-career. It is much harder to communicate each mile of that marathon to ensure you are given the opportunities that keep pushing you to the finish line.
As you move to new organizations or new teams, find ways to make your credentials known. As you look at the 10+ jobs on your resume, ensure that they are connected to tell one story. Finally, as you look for that next step in your marathon, don’t take it too quickly. Be picky about the steps you take to be sure that you are setting yourself up to have a strong marketing strategy to position yourself for your dream role.
