#238: The Importance of Career Experiments

Welcome to the MBA Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Al D. This is a show designed for aspiring, current, and former MBAs looking for advice on how you can grow your career through an MBA degree. During each episode, I'll talk to MBA students, graduates, and leaders about the MBA experience, navigating the workplace, and career development so you can learn how to develop and achieve your own version of career success through an MBA and beyond.

okay welcome back so today's lesson is all about career experiments and all career experiments and career experimentation is it's a hypothesis driven approach to exploring your curiosities and interests about your career growth and doing that in an intentional and iterative manner and this approach to growing in your career in more of an experimentation led approach is a just a little bit more of a practical and pragmatic way to acting your way into career growth. Now, I want to talk about this because I would say over the past decade, I've talked to thousands of leaders about how they've grown in their career.

And while some of them knew what they wanted and just worked really hard towards achieving it, there's a lot of them that didn't know what they wanted. And I'm just here to say that is a feature, not a bug. And that it's common to not know exactly what you want in terms of how you want to grow your career, what steps you want to take, how you want to advance, or the types of roles or opportunities that you want. And that's okay.

And this is partially due to human nature in terms of wanting to explore multiple possibilities, but also because the reality of it is that for many of us, there's never been more opportunities in terms of how to think about career growth, how to use different ways to learn and grow in order to achieve it, and how to even think about what career growth could be. And I think that one of the common challenges that many employees face when they think about their career is that they don't exactly know what they want, the specific steps to take, or perhaps even they don't even have a clear vision in mind of who they want to be or where they want to go.

And a lot of that is because many of us, the way that we learned or how we've learned about growth and learning is what we traditionally saw when we went to school, which was after first grade came second grade, after second grade came third grade, and everything moved in a linear fashion. And when it comes to career growth, there is still some of that happens, but it doesn't happen for everyone. And it was never meant to happen for everyone. It's just how traditionally we've always thought of it.

And so when we remove a little bit of the barrier to just considering career growth, to being about knowing all the steps you need to take in order to achieve a specific goal, and knowing the specific path you need to take, or having to take specific sets of roles, if we expand beyond that, there's a lot more possibility that is out there in terms of how we want to think about what career growth can be and all the different possibilities that could be in front of us. The other reality is, while all this is happening, is that the world of work is changing and continues to change so quickly.

Look at all the changes that many of us have had to experience over the past four to five years in terms of the COVID pandemic. And how do you keep up or take on a new career or take on a new opportunity when things are moving so fast. The world of work is becoming increasingly complex with a lot of different connected and moving parts. And with all these things, it sometimes can make it a little bit more ambiguous to know exactly what you should be doing, how you should be thinking about career growth, how you should be trying to grow or the steps that you should be taking.

And it can be really hard to the point sometimes where I do know of people who they say, look, career growth is important to me. I definitely want to take steps in the right direction, but I'm nervous that I'm going to take the wrong step. Or I don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future, so how do I know what steps I need to take? And what really makes this all hard is that the way that a lot of times we do career development tends to be pretty linear, step-by-step based.

And oftentimes in many places, in many organizations, maybe not yours, but in a lot of the ones I work with, I hear a little something like this. step one, identify where you want to be in five or 10 years. Step two, map where you are today. Step three, identify the gaps of where you are today and where you want to go.

Step four, identify the steps you need to take to get there. And step five, take the first step. And look, this is not a wrong approach. In fact, at various stages in my career, this approach helped me.

However, in my experience, I've learned, and again, talking to lots of people, that this isn't necessarily always helpful to everyone. Because again, not everything in life moves in a linear fashion. And furthermore, in a world of complexity and with so many things that are changing and so many different permutations of how things can materialize, that step-by-step nature sounds great in theory, but oftentimes it doesn't really happen. And finally, it assumes that we want to know where we want to be in five to 10 years.

And for a lot of us, we may not know And in some cases, we may have a lot of different ideas of what that could be. And so that's why I want to talk about something called a career experiment, which and this idea of career experimentation which I think could be really helpful especially if you are someone who either has a bunch of different ideas of what you want to potentially do in terms of steps you want to take or how you want to grow your career, or you're someone who is a little concerned about having everything mapped out, you want to grow.

I think this idea of a career experiment can really help you. And so all a career experiment, is it's a hypothesis-driven approach to exploring your interests and curiosities to grow in your career. And the way that I like to say this is that a career experiment helps you practically act your way into career growth. So here's the thing, and here's the thing that trips up a lot of people when they do career development planning or trying to think about career growth.

While reflection and thinking is important, you can't think your way into career growth. At some point, you have to take action. And that is the beauty of career experimentation in a career experiment. It helps you take action and helps you use those actions and the learnings from those actions to figure out what additional steps you want to take or other opportunities that you might want to take advantage of.

And so in order to explain career experiments, I'm going to draw a little bit on what some of us probably learned in science class and maybe in middle school. And so an experiment, all it is is a procedure that's designed to test a hypothesis as part of the scientific method. And in this case, the scientific method is our career. And a hypothesis is merely just an educated guess about something in our career that we are interested in, curious about, or would like to explore.

And all the career experiment is meant to do is that it's allowing us to explore that interest and curiosity. And in many ways, it gives us permission to learn about something that is interesting and meaningful to us as a means of helping us grow in our career. And I think the permission word is really valuable here because it really does give us permission to learn. And in some cases, fail.

And in a lot of cases, try again. And I think intuitively, we all know that these things are important. And in many cases, a fact of life. But we often fail to create conditions to do this.

And that's what's so great about a career experiment in terms of it allows you to test things out and to learn. And just like a science experiment, a career experiment has merit when it succeeds as well as when it doesn't succeed. Oftentimes in science, career experiments fail. And that's okay because there's a learning that comes from it.

And similarly, when we run career experiments, even if they don't prove out to be true, that is still a valid learning and a valid insight. And in many cases, it might actually save time because what we learned, we realized we don't end up wanting to do. So that's why a career experiment can be so valuable. And I think the last thing I would just add to this before I start to explain just the elements of a career experiment is that the beauty of a career experiment is it does just that.

Just like a science experiment, it allows us to try and iterate on something. And instead of approaching our career development as having a definitive set of steps that you need to take or a clear pathway to taking them, you can think of it more about something that you're intentionally trying out that you're learning on the fly and on the go. And that through those learnings, you're identifying what you want to take from those learnings to just take the next step. And for some, that experiment might mean actually figuring out if a path is interesting and exciting, then you want to keep going on it.

But it also can mean something else, like maybe you don't want to do it, or maybe you want to take a smaller version of that. And so just that experimentation mindset, that exploratory mindset of small kind of experiments and learnings and exploring those to take the next step, In many cases, I find that seems a little bit more palatable and a little bit more manageable to a lot of people. Okay, so at this point, you might be wondering, how do I conduct a career experiment? That's a great question.

So just to give some definition to this, a career experiment has four key points. The first is a hypothesis, and all a hypothesis is an educated guess of what you believe to be true. And this is baked and started with a curiosity or interest that you might have. Then the next element is called a test.

And all a test is, is a way to experiment to test or prove true or false if your hypothesis is true. And we'll share a little bit of some examples of some tests you can run. So hold your thoughts for now, but I'll give you some examples so that you have somewhere where you can start. The third piece is a learning.

And all learning is a key insight or summary from the test. And that learning helps you figure out how you would like to move forward. And then the fourth and final element of a career experiment is an action. An action is a result of the step you take in order to move forward.

And the action is key here because what you ideally want to do is you want to always make sure that you're closing the loop with your career experiment in that when you are running a test and having that learning, you want to make sure that learning gets put into practice and that you don't just run career experiments for the sake of running experiments. And this is important because what you learn, that learning and that action, what it does is that it fuels the next step that you can take.

And you just have this fortuitous cycle of learning and iterating and taking those learnings, taking an action and continuing to move and grow and learn in your career through that result And so that is the four different steps in the process In terms of how to actually bring this to life by breaking down a couple of steps. So let's take the hypothesis again. So a hypothesis, all that is, is just an educated guess that you believe to be true. And usually it's driven by something you're genuinely curious about or interested in, or perhaps you want to explore it further because you're just, that is something that you are excited about.

And so in order to come up with a hypothesis, you might ask yourself questions like any of the following to help you formulate what the hypothesis might be. And here are a couple of questions. What do you want to learn about yourself that would help you grow in your career? What is a skill or strength that you want to explore further?

What do you want to be true in one year from today? And how can an experiment help you? Is there a strength that you'd like to improve or use more of? Is there a development opportunity that will help you get to the next level if you improve it?

And basically what you can do is you can take the answers to some of those questions to come up with your own hypothesis. I'll give you a couple examples of one when I give you an example of how I've run career experiments in the past. So that's the first step in terms of creating a hypothesis. The second step is there are different types of tests that you can run in order to test the hypothesis.

And this is really the crux of a career experiment. And all the test is, is something you do to evaluate your hypothesis. And it's really just a simple course of action that helps you gain more insight into your hypothesis. And think of the test as a way to learn about your curiosity.

And the cool thing about tests is that because there are so many ways to learn and grow today, there are so many different options in terms of tests. And so I want to give a couple examples. There are many more that are out there that you can probably think of on your own as well. But I want to give a couple that I think will at least get you started in terms of thinking about different tests that you can run for yourself.

One test could be expanding the scope of your existing role. Another test could be using a curiosity and exploring it through a new project or task. Another test could be shadowing someone in their role who has the same role that you're interested in. Another one could be being able to explore a brand new role or function.

Another test could be taking on a stretch project of some kind. Another test could be exploring an interest or curiosity by taking an online course. Another test would be getting one-on-one leadership coaching. Another test could be developing a new or strengthening an existing skill.

And then the last example I have is exploring curiosity by connecting with mentors or peers. All of those are examples of different kinds of tests that you can run to go and explore as part of that career experiment. The goal, though, is to take that hypothesis, run a test, and then see what you learn from it. Okay, now that the hypothesis done, the tests, here's how it works.

Number one, formulate that hypothesis of what you want to experiment with. Number two, pick a type of test from any of the ones I just mentioned or any of your own to conduct that experiment. The third step, conduct the actual and execute the actual experiment and make sure you summarize the findings that you got from it. The fourth is evaluate the feedback and determine what the result was.

And then the fifth step is take the next step or in some cases, run another experiment. Okay. So I want to give a couple examples of how this happened to work for me in hopes of, Hopefully it helps you visualize and see how this could work for you. So for me, one example I have is that previously when I was a product marketer, I had been in the role for about two years and I was interested in figuring out if there were any other parts of product marketing over the two years I'd been in the role that I hadn't yet explored that I wanted to do more of.

And there is a certain aspect of product marketing called demand generation that I hadn't really done a lot with, but I was told was really important if I wanted to continue growing in my product marketing career. And so what I decided to do was that my hypothesis was I was excited about exploring other elements of product marketing, and I had yet to experience demand generation. So my hypothesis was that in order to keep growing as a product marketer, I should learn and become much more effective at demand generation.

So that was my initial hypothesis. Now, for experiments I could run, I had a couple different options. One could be a job or scope expansion. This would mean taking on maybe a project or set of projects that were related to demand generation in the existing role that I had.

Another type of career experiment that I could run would be that I could take a course in demand generation. If I wanted to lean into a career experiment that involved other people, one idea could be I could go talk to a couple other leaders who worked in demand generation to better understand from them how demand generation was important, what it took to do it, and if they thought it was valuable to learn as a product marketer. So right there, I just gave you three examples of different career experiments that I could run I actually went and ran all three of those career experiments And here what I found I realized after going taking on some demand generation projects and going to talk to other product marketers and leaders in demand generation, that while it was an important skill, it wasn't necessarily something that I was really enjoying.

And so having that baseline experience was good enough for me. And so my learning from that career experiment was that I don't need to do anything else with demand yet. I was all set. And so that was a really good and important learning because what that did was that the next time I ran a career experiment, I was able to explore something else instead.

So even though in that case, you could argue that the career experiment proved to be false and didn't pass, it allowed me to then use that time to run other career experiments. So that was a really valuable career experiment for me. I want to give you maybe another one just to try to hopefully make this a little bit more real. So this one comes from James, who was a former student in one of my classes.

And James was a front-end software engineer at a software company. And he had been in the role for three plus years. And he had overall about six years or more of work experience. James' hypothesis was, even though he was a software engineer, he actually really liked collaborating with other teams.

and he had been doing a little bit of mentoring through an employee resource group. And James's hypothesis was that because he really liked working with people, he really liked coaching and mentoring, that he might enjoy actually being a people manager. And this was not something he had considered before, but through these kinds of data points, he thought, you know what, maybe this is something that I could explore. So James came up with a couple different experiments that he could run to go figure this out.

And so one experiment would be talking with other engineering people managers to learn a little bit more about their job. Another experiment could be expanding his existing job to try to take on some managerial tasks for the team. And another example could be actually taking some courses in basics and the fundamentals of people management. So James opted for being able to talk with other engineering managers and then actually working with his own manager to try to take on some managerial type assignments.

on the team. So after running those assignments, James realized that he actually really did, in fact, like those managerial kind of roles and tasks and projects. And so as a result of that, he shared that with his manager and they worked together to try to get through both making some changes to James's existing role, as well as in working through his career development plan to identify more projects for James where he could actually take on more opportunities to flex those managerial skills.

And it took a little bit of time, but eventually, as a result of that, James was eventually able to get promoted into a people manager role. And so again, that's an example of something for James where he wasn't even thinking about that pathway before, but because he was able to follow his curiosity and use those career experiments, he was able to iterate to achieving some career growth. Those are a couple just examples of how career experiments can come to life. And again, I think what the key takeaway that I want to leave, what I want to leave you is that these can be things that you can do at any time, right?

These are not things that you have to do only during career development and planning, although it certainly can do them there, but you can do them when you are curious just about something that comes up in your work. You can do them because you want to keep pursuing just continuous learning. You can really do them when you do get to a point when you are thinking about a new role and you think you want to change jobs, instead of changing a job right away, run a career experiment, which is a much, much smaller set of tasks to do than trying to go out and apply for a job or anything like that.

So career experiments can be pretty versatile and the like. Okay. So again, while the linear career kind of process can work for some people, it doesn't always work for everyone. And in a world where there are so many opportunities to learn and grow.

I know it could sometimes be overwhelming with all the possibilities that could happen. And furthermore, there are just so many different ways we can think about career growth today. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to really try to sort through all of those to figure out what we want to do or how we want to grow in our careers. But I'm here to tell you that if you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry.

That's why we have career experiments and career experimentation. And so hopefully you can use this process to think about how you might be able to take a little bit more iterative and intentional and curiosity-driven path to growing in your career. But hopefully that you've got some insights to go and try out career experiments for yourself. Hi, everyone.

LD here. And thank you so much for listening to the MBA Insider Podcast. If you liked what you heard, make sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and to write a review. It will only take 15 seconds.

I'd also love to hear what you've been listening to on the podcast and any suggestions you have for how we can improve. Find me on LinkedIn or head over to mbaschooled.com backslash podcast.