How to Grow Your Career Through Experimentation

Are You Making Time For Career Experiments?

Since the beginning of 2022 I have conducted career development workshops with hundreds of employees, to teach them the mindset, skills and practices to help them manage their career. One of the most common themes I hear from these sessions is that people understand that in order to achieve their goals and personal happiness with their work and career that they need to take ownership of it, and then need to put in effort outside of working hard and doing a great job in order to do it, but when it comes to figuring out what specific actions they need to take, or what direction they need to go in, they often get stuck.

But these individuals are not the only ones who are thinking about their careers. Research from Gloat suggests that 48.1% of employees are looking for a new job within the next 90 days, and about 30% of employees don’t feel like their employer has outlined a path to professional development.

Well-intentioned employers understand that many employees want more opportunities for career development, learning and growth. They buy course libraries of thousands of on-demand learning programs,, they bring in guest speakers or thought leaders, they provide a guide around the performance management process, and they create leveling guides that detail the various levels and promotion criteria. And while some of these are helpful , most of these are efforts that help generally but don’t necessarily help specifically.

If your employer does these things, that’s great, and you should definitely pay attention and make use of what’s useful. But letting your career development be dedicated by an org chart or someone else always ends in you working toward a goal that’s not yours. There are better ways.

Making Time For Career Experiments

An experiment (like the ones we learned in science class in middle school) is a procedure designed to test a hypothesis as part of the scientific method. In this case, the scientific method is our career, and the hypothesis is just merely an educated guess about something in our career that we are interested in or curious about.