Career Progression! Not Perfection

Today I’m going to share one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my early career that will hopefully help you in your career journey. The term career progression is thrown around a lot when talking to professionals, and never really meant much to me until I contrasted it with the idea of career perfection. Here’s how I define the two:

Career Perfection: The last job you want to have in your lifetime. Having this job means you are truly happy doing what you are doing, and you could do it every day and not get tired of it. As the saying goes: “Have a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” Everyone will have their own idea of what Career Perfection is for them, and it’s very likely that it cannot be achieved without time, dedication, and some financial resources.

Career Progression: The person’s workplace journey from job to job or role to role. While these positions are not the terminal job someone would want to have, they are an important component of getting there. In every new role taken on, a professional is able to learn new things, improve on existing skill sets, and continue their professional development.

When I was in high school and college, I was focused more on career perfection because I was simply thinking about what I wanted to do when I “grew up.” These ideas ranged from owning a karate school to being a highly paid consultant, but I never really had an idea of how to get there or what it would be like if I ever did. Now that I’m a teacher of college students and mentor of young professionals, I tell my students and mentees to focus more on career progression because that shift in focus will get them closer to their own career perfection. Before I get into the reasons why this is the case, let me share my own journey as an example:  

I started off wanting to do “advisory” or “consulting” work right out of college and didn’t want to work in any other service line. After going through a number of different interviews and an internship, I noticed that most of the higher level professionals doing the advisory work I wanted to do started their careers somewhere else (usually as an auditor). After realizing this, I started my career as an auditor so I could get some professional experience and baseline skills understanding how businesses operate which would be valuable to me as a consultant performing advisory services later down the road. After over 5 years of hard work of learning how businesses operate while auditing, I took that experience into a new role at an advisory firm (a role that I would not have gotten without my previous audit experience).So after years of learning the ropes in another role, I’m finally taking an advisory role, something I wanted all the way back in college. While it’s not Career Perfection for me just yet, it is certainly a meaningful step in my Career Progression.

Back to the question: “Why should I focus on Career Progression instead of Career Perfection?” The answer can be summarized in the famous quote:

“Perfection is the enemy of progress” - Winston Churchill

For the purposes to this lesson, we can translate this to:

“Career Perfection is the enemy of Career Progression” - JohnTheCPA

The idea behind these quotes is that for many people, focusing only on perfection or the ideal leads to inaction. Someone who waits for the ideal time or situation to act will quickly fall behind those who aim to take steps forward no matter how little they might be. Eventually, the people who focus more on learning and moving forward will get closer to their Career Perfection than those who solely focus on their own Career Perfection. In the professional world, this is especially true because no one is going to be qualified to be a CEO as their first position out of school. 

The best thing you can do is identify what they need from a role to take the next step in their journey. For me, this meant taking on an audit role because I would gain the knowledge of business finance and operations, I would need to support those businesses as a consultant, despite knowing that I wouldn’t be able to last forever doing busy season hours and assurance work. Once you’ve gotten the benefits you want out of a role, it’s important to take the next step (either through a promotion or by finding a new job). By taking the time to understand what you need to be successful in the long run, you can more effectively navigate your Career Progression by constantly growing with your roles with the hopes that one day that progress leads to your own Career Perfection. If you think about Career Perfection as the end goal, Career Progression is taking the necessary steps to get there which include getting valuable work experience, learning from mentors, and securing social and financial resources to support your journey.