Career lattices – what are they and why should we be making them

Step ladder on a pink wall, career ladder concept

ARTICLE SUMMARY

In this episode of Spilling the T, we delve into the concept of "Career Lattices" and why they offer a fresh perspective on building a fulfilling and dynamic professional journey. 

In this episode of Spilling the T, we delve into the concept of “Career Lattices” and why they offer a fresh perspective on building a fulfilling and dynamic professional journey. 

Together with Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied, we explore the notion of embracing versatility over the traditional career ladder. 

Discover how a career lattice allows individuals to traverse various industries, roles, and skill sets, fostering adaptability and continuous growth. 

With real-life success stories and valuable insights, learn how to create a lattice tailored to your unique strengths and interests. Tune in to unlock the power of career lattices and find new ways to navigate your path to a rewarding and ever-evolving career!

hello everyone thank you for tuning in again I am Kate bitman the content director at Shan code and today we are
discussing career lses what they are and why we should be making them we’re going to delve into the concept of career
lesses and why they offer a fresh perspective on building a fulfilling and dynamic professional Journey luckily
I’ve got the fabulous kti ceram CEO of Applied with me today to explore the
notion of embracing versatility over the traditional career re ladder welcome JY
lovely to to have you on the podcast thanks Kaye lovely to be here and thank
you so much for taking time out uh to chat about this we haven’t had this on podcast before so we’ve got a lot to
dive into today can we start with a bit of background about yourself though just to set the scene please of course so my
background is quite mixed so typical squiggly career Testament coming to you
uh my journey started into the workforce with the traditional economics uh that’s
what I was trained in went into Investment Banking did that for a few years then I realized that was not what
I was meant to be doing wasn’t my cup of tea so I went back to school and was
this in this flux where I didn’t know what I wanted to do next and I just fell
into Tech that’s what i’ like to say I tried my hand at a few things realized that technology was one of the few ways
that you could have scalable impact scalable sustainable impact on the planet um and then that’s how I landed
into Tech and I learned coding and started my first company back in 2013 oh wow and you learned coding
obviously you didn’t study that and you just decided to throw yourself into did you do a boot camp or how did how did
that happen no just YouTube oh wow okay um I do admit I picked up the easiest
what what is meant to be the easiest like language which is python uh and I
think the it was a bit easier for me because we had real live test case I was
starting my company with my co-founder back in 2013 both of us knew little bits of Technology had no formal education in
technology but we helped each other we learned of the internet open sourced a lot of things um and build our first
wobbly prototype that we raiseed some funds on amazing and so had you seen
that from somebody else then that had kind of inspired you to to want to you
know it’s it’s quite a fault to think you know I’m going to go off I’m going to learn to code and I’m gonna do it and
I’m gonna be self-taught that’s that’s you know quite a commitment uh it is but it is also a challenge in the way I was
thinking of my career going forward I had done a particular thing investment banking for about five six years I
realized that’s not where my my future lay I didn’t see myself doing that for the next 30 40 the odd years um and it
was more about experimentation when I started this so back end of
20 12 2013 is when I quit banking um and I went on a journey of what next what do
I value what do I want to learn what where will I find fulfillment and Al those kinds of questions that inspired
me to dig deeper so I went and tried a few things I actually went back to school did a master’s um and that’s when
I embedded myself in different environments to understand what I liked and what I disliked um and that’s what
gave me an understanding about technology and of course the potential
that you can have from technology um and that was the start as they say amazing
that is it’s a very inspiring story I love it when people say you know I was in a career and and like you just said
that that’s not what I wanted to do for the next 30 to 40 years and instead of sitting in in that career you just
actively thought you know what I’m going to do something different and you went off and you did it because you do hear
those people that just sit in that career that they just cannot stand and you know 20 years on they’re thinking
I’m still here I’m quite privileged and lucky because it’s it is hard to find
and it is it is exactly the reason why we’re here to talk about how we broaden out uh and adapt to new challenges and
new environments yes and we are going to talk about that today through career
luses now what in Earth do we mean by career ltis can you give us a definition
yes so the the word ltis it creates a visualization in our heads right it is
like a grid it’s a grid like movement or a pattern uh and if you put that in
context of a work environment think all School think the old types of organizations now I’m calling them old
because the contrast is the modern organiz oranization the older non-modern organizations let’s call them that uh
you could only progress a certain way you would do your work get promoted
continually to the next level up and the next level up so there was only one way up and that was what was termed as a
ladder um recently we know that the needs of these organizations are
changing um they’re modern organizations take tech companies startups even they
have to be more flexible evolve very rapidly and there is a a place for
nonlinear Journeys so this kind of a lce framework it allows for sideways
backward diagonal any kind of movement that is different to an upwards only
movement and that’s what we mean by a lce what it does is it allows us to cut
across different Specialties within a company it can widen our perspective Ive
of how the industries operate um and it
basically tells us to me it tells us that the knowledge economy is here to stay because it is so so diverse it’s
the way we are thinking about Career Development rather than just going one way up there are so many different
varied ways to go through this um and and it’s personally very important to me
because my entire career is is exactly that granted the first five to six years
were typical corporate but since then it’s been about 10 years now I’ve been doing different kinds of things running
my own company fundraising product and all of those different kinds of skills
and experiences have now culminated in me running applied and it’s it’s those
kinds of things when you sit back and reflect it’s as if the stars have aligned and the dots have joined to form
that pattern and form that ladder effectively but it’s not really a ladder
it is a lattice because it’s gone in all different shapes and forms and become squiggly over the years and only now
when I said back and reflect on it I see oh there was a reason and all of those things have fallen into place for me to
be here right now yes yes I love that it’s I think as well we we tend to think
when you leave University as you said there’s that there’s that ladder if if you even if you know if you go to
university or don’t when you leave school you tend to think that your career projection is going to be up
you’re always going to climb a ladder and you would worry wouldn’t you if your CV doesn’t look that way um almost
that’s that’s what you’re used to seeing people just being promoted or moving up through a company or moving companies um
and I wanted to ask you a little bit about why we should be making career lates and and you just touched upon it
there just the amount of skills that you pick up from doing different things and
and and trying different things I mean and personally I I am um was a a
journalist when I left um university uh and then um a little bit later in life
um uh I was caring for a parent and um I ended up moving into a copywriter role
and um it was just easier for me to be slightly closer to home and I could you know be where I needed to be when when I
needed to be but I didn’t realize at the time all of the skills that I picked up I you know suddenly working with clients
and different websites and I all of these I worked in advertising and branding of all things I had never ever
done before but really helped me when I went to my next role and as you said it was like the Styles align suddenly and
you think oh actually if I hadn’t have gone sideways I hadn’t have picked up all of
those new things but I suppose that’s one of the main reasons isn’t it why we should be thinking about making these
career lates completely I that’s exactly the point for me from uh candidates
perspective someone who’s newly applying to the workforce it is giving them the best shot for career development as I
said modern organizations they are intertwined they have different needs
than organization that was in the 1900s um we place a lot of emphasis on
teamwork we place a lot of emphasis on diverse perspectives um and there’s enough and more evidence to say
diversity in organization helps the bottom line not just you know the moral
reasons for doing it uh and all of those reasons make sense for a candidate to
bring different kinds of experience so moving across as we call it sideways even though I don’t
particularly find the term appealing we move across the company we
can get to see and experience different departments different uh teams we can work with
different types of people different roles and all of those give us a wealth of experience that we would not get had
we just been going up and up I know companies that’s that’s not always easy
at companies is it sometimes it’s almost easier to leave a company to try something new because some companies are
a little bit like they don’t want you to move to different departments and and try new things it’s almost easier just
to unfortunately move out of a company that you might love um and go sideways
and then you know come back again I suppose it depends on the company culture really doesn’t it it is it is
going back to and that’s that’s really important I think that’s you’ve hid the nail on the head Kaye it is the company
culture it is what kind of employees and what kinds of candidates you want to attract and how
you think about Talent yeah so when we think about either hiring at applied or
supporting the companies we work with we are saying we need to completely rethink the way we hire uh so at a process level
it would mean different kinds of application process your compensation Poli policy or on boarding all of that
starts looking very different when you start thinking of a ltis ltis grid type approach rather than you are going to
get this pay for the next job title and the next job title up so there’s a process level change which a lot of
companies might not be able to do uh or have the ability to do and then there is
the culture level which is a higher level up which elevates this whole thing which is are those companies set up to
allow these people with different persp perspectives and different experiences to thrive and we do this all the time at
appli when we hire because we’re looking at skills holistically and we say this
to customers we advise this to customers someone who’s a firefighter can be a sales exact because they bring those
skills someone who’s a DEC diver can become a customer success person because
they’ve done the client facing relationships and deep sea diving in highly stressful situations and we talk
about that we talk about acquiring those skills that are so widely relevant and
bringing them to certain jobs and it is it is the kind of culture it goes back to that is do we have those cultures in
companies um and yes it is there we can see that there there’s a tile shift
towards companies that care about people that care about culture and want to
retain employees and you will see that that these kinds of jobs and experience
Es are starting to become the norm in those kinds of organizations yes and and as you’re saying just being open to to new Talent
as well and like you said you know you can come from all different um backgrounds and bring different skills
with you but if you reach that uh interview process and you know your uh
the interview board is looking at you like you don’t have the traditional techy skills to to to fulfill this role
suppose it’s just you know the tech industry is crying out for Talent it’s just being open-minded isn’t it to people with lots of different skill sets
and if you need if the company feels they need to train you up in a certain area to tick all of the boxes then they
need to be willing to do that um if they just think you know but actually you have all of the soft skills that that
tick all the boxes that we need you might be missing one technical skill because you’re taking a sideways step
then they need to fill in that Gap surely yeah this is my gripe with the
industry I still don’t consider myself an HR person because I I have fallen into this because of the experiences I
have had uh but we absolutely as the industry do not know how to match people
that is why we are crying front and center saying I can’t hire I can’t
retain I don’t have enough people that is completely untrue the truth of the matter is Talent exists we don’t know
how to screen them we don’t know how to match them as an industry right and it is coming back to that point how do we
take all these these different experiences that people have learned and shaped their lives and start putting
them into something that is structured and can actually be used as an assessment or screening to contextualize
for certain jobs uh and that’s number one even even identifying that people quite often can’t
identify whether a person has skills because what is happening is you send a CV out that CV is read by a recruiter in
10 15 20 seconds if certain words don’t hit the eyeballs the CD’s gone delete
y that’s how it is being done whether it’s a human doing it or some kind of automated system doing it that is the
Crux of the issue and there is no way we can GLE what skill person we need to
rethink what we are reading out of a CV so even the bits that are written on the CV we need to start reshaping that and
thinking through what are we getting out of the CV can we really understand whether this firefighter can actually work in this tech company yes he can
if you let him and you break the mold of what talent looks like and and once you
pass that then you get to your point which is are gaps then yes we should be training them but we’re not even at the
first stage of where letting people in yeah I hear that a lot with um exmilitary in Tech um and it was um an
area that um I used to um uh cover quite quite a lot when writing the news and
exactly the same thing military have wonderful skills and when you leave you
can sometimes think you know I’m not quite sure where I fit on the company ladder where I F which rung I need to go
onto because you you might have been a captain in the Army and you’re not going to go in as a junior when you go um in
into civy street so you know it’s kind of that where do I find my place and a lot of companies um have an on boarding
system where you know what they they help you find your place because good companies know that ex military military
for instance have really good skills that they bring with them so why can’t they you know fill in the gap of what
you need them to do um but again that’s a a sideways step and it’s just trying
to find find your CLS I mean you mentioned a little bit there about um
the employer side so you know getting um people in and screening them hopefully
more people making it through um than just you know going sing through their CVS and and then being to Ed um but
we’re currently experiencing a hustle culture so on the on the employee side
how in a sideways step is better than climbing the ladder well for candidates it is hard as
you say if you’re just coming out of University there is a socialization around it the socialization is around
the corporate ladder you have to climb it therefore the first place is this
kind of debate this kind of conversation where we start normalizing that that’s
okay for some people but not okay for others so everybody goes through a different Journey where different
perspectives and different factors are important at different times in their life maybe when you’re 20 you need to
get into the workforce you’re probably viewing the ladder versus lce less of a
debate and a choice and therefore take the job but once you as a candidate have
the optional optionality my view is is always going to three things to
understand whether you take that sideway step or the same step or the furest
upward step in the same company um and the first thing of the three things is the framing for me it’s always sideways
or step down or all of these words and framing it’s from whose perspective whose definition is it and whose value
is it and it keep coming back to me that it is the value or the definition of the
recruiter who’s not going going to look at your CV for even 5 seconds so why do we place so much emphasis on that yes
that’s number one number two for me is questioning are we learning new things
so if we are evaluating two opportunities and we think one is up just a flashier title maybe with some
better pay and the second is maybe a sideways step or a step down if you want
to call it that uh maybe similar titles similar responsibilities but it looks
like a sideways step are we learning more do we think we will broaden our perspectives we’ll broaden our skill
base that’s Point number two uh and point number three is are we taking a
flexible approach so sometimes Market forces shifts our hands so example
recently we’ve had lots of layoffs with fears of the recessionary market and if
that is such a case where you’re forced into a position where you might be forced into taking sideways step we can
still go back to point number one and two Point number one reframe the whole conversation is whose value whose
definition it is not sideways maybe it is the best thing for you you might realize that only in five years time
because the St of aligning yes and a lot of factors that you touched on there um
about different different points in your life because you as you said in in your
20s you’re always just thinking oh I’m just going to climb the corporate ladder or whatever it might be but then you
reach a certain certain time and other things come up and your priorities might change and it’s okay to think you know I
might need to go sideways and whether that’s you know a personal decision of something that that’s happening or um
like yourself you know you just suddenly it Dawns on you this is not what I want to do and you want to try something new
um for me personally it become about travel I couldn’t travel internationally um and being a journalist I did that a
lot at the time in my 20s and then all of a sudden you think well there’s this new priority in my life and I can’t
travel so you go sideways so it really depends on just you know different
different times different stages in your life people you know they might become parents and they they have you know
completely new priorities um and that it’s that it’s okay that you know that
that we can do that I don’t think a lot of us though I don’t think we there’s we use the term at the start
Wiggly careers and I’ve heard this often that’s they becoming the norm it’s not I
mean I suppose the more conversations we hear about it the more they become normal won’t they exactly the and you’re
right you’re starting to hear these words as am I uh and Broad brush trokes
yes they are becoming the norm because we are talking about them more and more and more and I’m seeing that more so we
have what 300 customers we’ve had about half a million candidates through the applied platform and we’ve seen this not
normal what is not considered in the typical view of talent or the typical recruiter world as normal coming through
more and more so more people coming through the door that we don’t expect them to look a certain way or feel a
certain way and have certain experiences and more and more people are doing that and I think there’s
a there’s it’s interesting because there’s a push and pull and the pull factor we’ve already talked about a
little bit which is this the concept of the modern organization the the concept
that favors more team mindset working sharing learning with different
perspectives we’ve already talked about that a little bit but there is a push factor which I’m seeing lately lately
maybe the last year two years three years is uh an example of that is if you’ve seen this um antiw work upsell on
Reddit don’t know if you’ve seen it but it’s really interesting it is people
leaving jobs or being forced to leave jobs and not wanting to work because of the certain risk constraints in a work
environment given to them yes those are exactly the kind of people who will find their way back into the workforce at
some point or the other doing completely different things for the time they have been quote unquote out of the workforce
and those are the kinds of careers that have becoming normal because they will not follow a standard path they will not
follow the expected path but they would have gain skills in the middle in the inm doing whatever they wish to and all
of those sales as employers we will have to start valuing and finding a way to
bring back and reward in the workforce and that’s and not seeing that as a red
flag yeah if you see that traditionally on on a CV you would think what Earth happened there what did that person do
you know it’s kind of not seen as a bonus that you’ve got these new skills that’s the mindset Shi right if you
think about again 50 hundred years ago um average tenure of a person in the
organization as we’re moving away from the Industrial Age would be what maybe 20 30 40 years even today’s age the
knowledge economy is here to stay and we are seeing average 10 and at least in a
tech company could be two years three years yeah so if that’s the case you are going to leave the company you may may
not choose to do that same job in a different industry in a different environment and then you’ll come back to
the work Force um and so this is becoming normal both with the push and
pull of how we are thinking about the workforce changing the needs of the organization changing and even what the
future of the work looks like in in 2050 we don’t even know what kinds of jobs
will exist so how do we think we can look at a pure CV and just look at some
words on that and understand whether this person can do the job the job which doesn’t exist today but will exist in
time yes yeah it’s um yeah it’s it’s a
tough one and I I think um you are correct as an employer as well just just being more mindful of of the different
way not only the different ways that people make it into Tech but also to not just disregard people because you know
they they might have gone sideways or we’ve spoken about sideways and up but there’s also down and you touched upon
that a little bit before sometimes people feel they need to take a step down and and for employers not to look
at that and think something Dreadful must have happen there you know it’s it’s for them for that person to have
decided that at that moment in their life they needed to take a step down and I wanted to ask you a little bit about
how can we move past the shame of taking a step down because that’s kind of what it’s seen as it is an emotional Journey
right and take my experience I when I closed my first startup I was applying
for jobs and that set off about a emotional journey of six to eight months
where I would apply for jobs and not hear back and that’s what landed me into
HR Tech still don’t consider myself an HR Tech person but here I am running this company for four years and it it is
that emotional Journey that in the moment is really hard for anybody who who Who’s applying and I can tell you
you’re absolutely right at that point it was such a struggle for me to not get the next job that was viewed as The Next
Step Up rather than down or sideways um and what I learned from that Journey
was the the whole concept of reframing what are we moving towards
like where would I find fulfillment what are my values what I want to do in life
now I do acknowledge that is coming from a privileged place because I have had the privilege of doing something and
gaining skills and therefore by virtue of that I’m now in a better position to reflect and acknowledge all those things
um so that does come later in in the journey as a as an employee in the
workforce but very early on let’s say now even now or back in 2007 when we
had the banking crisis and even last year year again during coid times we’ve seen this massive layoffs people people
will have to choose sometimes they will have to take sideways steps and maybe
step that are viewed as down um and the way we remove the shame
is one for the individual for the employee to really assess what they value in life and find their path and
find their happiness but as employers I think it’s really important for us to normalize this culture of it’s
okay because it doesn’t matter where you’ve learned and where you’ve got that
experience it’s okay because we will value that experience and we will value that expertise regardless of where
you’ve learned it and that’s what we need to do as an industry as employers we need to get really good at that which
we haven’t um yes because it can come across as you almost feel like an
employer is doing you a favor sometimes think you know we done you a favor and we let you in even though you didn’t you
know have all of the skills that we need did but you had some extra ones that we were interested in it kind of needs to
come from exactly as you phrased it there we value you and your new skills
um and we can you know uh invest in you in any other areas that we need rather
than that person kind of feeling like thank God that company let me in you know kind of it’s reframing it as you
said thinking back to your point about the ex military it’s the the parallel I think is the same with the women mothers
um they leave and there’s enough and more again research on women after motherhood leaving jobs and leaving
companies and then they have to come back and we had applied constantly
strive to explain and educate the world that once you’ve become a parent you
have all these other skills you’ve gained as a parent and I can speak to this because I have a newborn now and
I’m learning and I’m growing as a person and all of that can be brought back to the workforce can be yes the company
into the team setting and we don’t know how to value that we don’t know how to screen for that we don’t know how to
test for that as employers and that’s where the rethinking of hiring the rethinking of career development needs
to happen how do we Elevate those skills how do we surface those skills how do we start valuing them because those are the
important skills in the modern organization and you think of this now we have ai we have a lot of emerging
technology a lot of our jobs will be replaced many tasks with within our jobs will be replaced but what would not be
replaced is the unique human qualities the unique domain of humans which is teamwork and being able to work with
each other in a collaborative setting that cannot be replaced and that’s the bit that all of these other bits and
pieces and experiences of your life will bring which which is what we have to get better at at solving for yes I love that
all the the new skills that you would learn as a parent instead of that’s well that’s see being seen as a a period of
absence you know and just thinking well there’s just a gap that I have to explain on the CV um and and whether uh
you know it’s it’s a mom or a dad and how long they decide to be absent from from work or take a break or whatever it
may be the reason why they’re taking a break you know the skills that you pick up during that time it just should be
seen as you mentioned before as just more valuable skills that that you’ve
brought to the table um that’s that’s really hard to do and while that’s the
positive challenge the way one of the immediate steps for example that
employees could do is start removing dates from CVS and we did a national campaign in the UK is like let’s just
remove dates from CVS because it doesn’t make sense whe they learned something
and there was a gap of a year or two years or three years if we are testing for those skills in a robust way and we
are rethinking how hiring is done then it doesn’t matter whether there was a gap of half a year because they suddenly
haven’t cease to be the same person they suddenly haven’t lost the skills if they’ve become a mother for example so it is it is those kinds of
steps that we could start taking as employers but there is still um
restructuring to be done in how we think of hiring yes yes because I wanted to ask you a
little bit about that about what companies um can do to support those who less traditional career p and you
mentioned a great one there removing dates and I think sometimes as well you
know if if you don’t want to reveal you know where you were or what you were doing you know and you kind of you’re
okay talking about it on the surface um but you’re right you don’t you don’t have to include all of that sometimes
you know it’s kind of like an employer digging into you know wanting to know well what were you doing well you know
you were off being a parent or you know caring for somebody or whatever it may be um and just removing those dates
makes that so much easier for simple thing but it does change um and it is it
is those biases that we have we there’s about 40 Years of research that says we
index on certain things on that piece of paper the CV which is your name your age
your gender how many years youve worked in a certain place and how much you’ve jumped jobs Etc all of these that’s
because all these bias start firing in our brains and we start building a a stereotype in our head now more often
than not that stereotype is incorrect and that person can do a better job than we think they can do yes and so if we
start removing these tiny pieces of information that have no relevance to the Hing decision what in scientific
terms we call noise if we start removing all that noise then what is left with is the meaty bit is we can start gleaning
more important things from the CVS can this person actually do the job and thriv in the
job yes because people do worry um and I’ve had conversations on here before uh
with ladies who have said um would you stick out a job if you really disliked
it if you felt like you know what I made a wrong decision I did I did something I shouldn’t have done whether you you know
started your your own business and and and or you moved to a business that just wasn’t for you and you thought oh you
know what I made the wrong turn would you stay at that company because you were worried that you know on your CV it
looks like you’ve exited too fast um and stick that out but actually you know you could really damage your mental health
in in in the um the time being or would you just exit and try something else and then you have to almost explain to you
know future employers what you were doing and and why why you did that and it’s almost just having to be honest and
say you know what I I tried something and I took a wrong turn and you know sometime but as you said if you’re being
screened and it’s not in you’re not being screened by a human they’re not going to pick that out you’re not going
to be able to say I made a mistake I tried something new and I you know they’re not going to see that are they
and yeah it is it’s it’s it’s an inflection point I think because it’s the way technology is changing
especially with AI we really need to think through what hiring and skills mean in the world
of AI most of us will start using AI in the next 2 three five years 10 years it
might be very prevalent in the way we do our work um and therefore certain skills
and jobs that are uniquely positioned for humans that’s what we need to start testing for and in that context if you
think about whether this person was away from the workforce for nine months or 12 months it doesn’t really matter it
absolutely seizes to matter at that point um and so it is starting that
conversation today to normalize it for the world to make sure that we are
starting to bring in all of these different facets and experiences and talking about them and then just that
just the understanding that skills are transferable they don’t have to fit a
certain mold it doesn’t have to be that the same person did that same job in the same type of company throughout their
life they can work in any other job as long as those skills can be transferred into this new job yes and that can
happen as well any point in your career we have a lot of ladies on here especially on our Live Events they
always throw in the question is it ever too late to change direction in your career is that something I can see
shaking your head no one word never never it’s never too late um I I’ve I’ve
said this before we now we’re seeing the average tenure to be two three years in
in um context of a modern organization um not what they would be
in my par generation where they would work 30 40 years in an organization and if you start thinking of your next 2
three years and where you would file F find fulfillment or what you would value
as skills then that starts reframing the conversation in your head and that’s
what I do that’s that’s easier to do because then you can break it down and you can start looking at what can I
really learn um and I always say this to everybody I work with you learn all love
the job nine out of 10 days otherwise you leave yes you’re not loving it you’re not learning then it’s time to go
and you find something else and and a lot of times people like me I’ve seen them we we step out and we’re like okay
don’t know what we’ll do next and that’s when this squiggly careers get reinforced squiggly or Wiggly whatever
we want to call it yes H and and you’re right I I have heard that on here before
a lot of ladies have said to me you know what when it gets to the point where you’re just you just don’t think that
environment is right for you and and you’re starting to worry and you’re thinking you know what I should just go
instead of worrying about you know you should have at least a minimum of one year on your CV you know kind of are you
going to be able to stick it out if you’re not enjoying it then just just exit and I think I’ve had a few ladies
um tell me the same there is always that worry though of what that is and we’ve all and we’ve all been there and if I
were 20 right now would still have that worry in me yeah so we we’ve all been there but if I ask the other question
the flip side is what if in two three years time employees stop stop asking for dates on CVS then you sticking in a
job that you’re not finding fulfillment for a year at the cost of your mental health it’s a little too late because it
does doesn’t affect anybody negative it affects you as a person negatively but
it doesn’t postively affect anybody because that would be disregarded CD and you could have just been using that time
to learn something new yeah that you would find fulfilling or
rewarding so it’s it’s important to go back to those three questions that for me it’s always reframing is whose
definition who lives are we living it’s that step down step up it’s someone’s definition it might not be true for
everybody but we are forced and constrainted by that so it’s reframing that uh and then of course the what are
we learning and how flexible are we and if we think of those three things quite often we’ll find a solution to the
problem or find the next step for our careers yes definitely and we are almost
out of time but I wanted to ask you one last thing do you have any advice for our listeners on taking a sideways step
or if they’re considering it and uh would love to know any advice that you wish someone had told you when you went
sideways well one one just one device piece which is take a
chance especially when one is new to the work force when I was younger and I wish someone had told
me at 18 that you could try five different jobs in five years and you know what nothing would change well
you’d probably learn more things but nothing would change when you were 40 or 50 or 60 because you would have learned
new things and we quite often forget that the lifespan um as they say the
days are long and life short we quite forget that um and so recontextualizing
for that telling ourselves that we can try all these new things especially when people are joining the workforce uh and
then see where where their true happiness lies yes I love that and and
to continue as an industry to to share stories like yours and and others about
you know it’s okay to move around um and um you know people are still happy I
mean they get ups and downs but people ultimately are hopefully happy in the end so um yeah it’s um wonderful advice
to end today on because we are already out of time thank you so much for joining me today it’s been so
interesting um to hear your own journey and I’m sure our listeners are going to find it um so useful as well um to hear
about uh career lesses which is a new term for me so thank you so much well thank you for having me it was a
fantastic conversation thank you and all our listeners thank you so much for
always uh for joining us and we hope to see you again next time

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