Career After Entry Level: How to Pave Your Path

Someone asked me this recently:

"There's so much help out there for freshers. But what about the next stage? I'm two years in. Nobody talks about this part."

Fair. Nobody does.

Campus to corporate is a portal. You walk through it once. After that, nobody paves the road for you.

You became a founder without signing up for it

The day you got that job, you started a business. The business is you. Look at what you're running:

Operations. The actual work.
Founder discovery. What you're good at, what you want, and what skills will take you where you want to be. Three different questions.
Market research. Which direction is worth walking, and what it pays.
Storefronts. CV, LinkedIn, portfolio. Public whether you maintain them or not.
Sales. To your employer and to the market outside. Continuously, not just when you're hunting.

Five jobs, one person, no handover note.

Most people never leave operations

Can't blame them. When there are forty capable people for every decent seat, holding on is the rational move. The market pushes people into survival mode, then calls them unambitious for being in it.

So if you're two years in and already asking what's next, you're ahead of the room. Lovely.

The question is: how do you ace the next levels? It's comparatively easier than people think.

Two roads from here.

Road one: the referral

Expand your network into the companies you want. Apply through their ads. Get someone inside to forward your CV. Ace the interview. Done.

It's simpler, but it's lengthy yet uncertain. It depends on the strength of your CV and influence of your network. Even then, your CV might get shift-deleted if the insider who forwarded it is not favored by the hiring manager. You wouldn't even know why you are not getting shortlisted despite having strong fit to the job you applied.

It might still help you get the next job after many attempts, but that may raise another doubt in next couple years into your mind: is it actually what I want? This keeps repeating within specific period after every job hop. That period may be two years for you now, but it may be different for others or even for you in a latter phase of your career.

You treated the symptom. You didn't cure the disease.

It is an autobot solution, where you don't pave the path, you just walk the path that unfolds before you. And you don't know if the path leads to a broken bridge without any way to cross the river.

Road two: design it

Know yourself properly, with structure
Build a 1-3-5 year plan across career, life and finance together
Build a system you'll actually follow. A plan without one is a wish
Upgrade the storefronts
Stun your target market with frequent show-up of your skills and expertise
Keep firming aura on weekly basis, your brand will build itself
Be a wolf amongst the sheeps that are grazing for the non-existent grasses
Tell one single story that flowers all your skills and interests in flourishing colors
Over time the ratio flips. Fewer applications going out, more knocks coming in

The cost is six to eight weeks before anything shows, which is exactly when people quit. And it doesn't replace your network. It makes your network work.

So

Road one is a tactic. Road two is what makes the tactic work.

Take the referral. Use the network. Just don't let that be the whole plan, or in two years you'll be right back here, asking an older version of the same question.

You founded this business the day you walked through the portal. Might as well run it properly.

Learn. Apply. Grow. In one word, LAGBro!