K, at Ksblog is one of my favorite reads, specifically for nuggets of wisdom like this article.
In a nutshell, she recommends using the corporate world to learn and to gather resources. According to her, once you are about 30, you are pretty much done ascending the ranks. You’ll move at most one rung up or down from there. At that point “they” quit mentoring & teaching you quite as hard, figuring you’ve reached your level. So, that’s the perfect time to switch careers from business drone to entrepreneur.
That’s my interpretation, of course. She says it much more elegantly.
Then once you find yourself stuck,
take your learning chips
and cash out,
moving to the next big game.
No related posts.
JLP at AllThingsFinancial sent me by. Nice site. I’m surprised that 30 was considered the cutoff age. But maybe it’s right. Plenty of people move up by switching jobs around then.
I remember being at a meeting on a former job where a VP came in to talk to us young kids about staying with the company. There was an epidemic of young people leaving the job. It was a tough sell: she had moved up to VP partly due to job changes.
I thought it sounded pretty young as well, until I started thinking about the arc of my corporate career. I was getting 20% or more raises every year until about 30, then hit a brick wall. There are a lot of factors influencing this, of course, but it really does ring true for me.