Career Success Isn’t Built Alone
For so many of us, especially first-gen professionals, the gaps are clearest in the rearview mirror. The unwritten rules. The opportunities you didn’t know existed.
Here’s what I’ve learned: the most successful professionals don’t navigate their career alone. They have a deliberate mix of people around them. 🙌🏼 Some close, some distant. Some who’ve known them for years, some they’ve only recently met.
A landmark study by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford researchers, using LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data on 20 million users, found that “weak ties” (looser, more distant professional connections) generate the highest rate of actual job mobility. Not those in your closest circle.
And research from Georgetown University shows that first-gen job seekers tend to lean heavily on close personal networks—family, neighbors, people who love us, but don’t always have access to the rooms we’re trying to enter.
It feels a bit counterintuitive to think that the acquaintance you met once at a networking event might be the best person to open the right door for you. 🤯
But career success needs both width and depth. 💡
- Width is reach. The looser, more distant connections that expose you to opportunities outside your existing circle. The connector you haven’t met yet, the acquaintance from a conference two years ago, the alum you’ve never reached out to.
- Depth is what the people closest to you can actually provide. The specific, ongoing support that helps you grow once you’re in the room. A mentor who knows your history. A peer who tells you the truth.
Build Your Personal Board of Directors
It starts with looking at who you already have on your team, and getting honest about what’s missing. Think of it as your Personal Board of Directors.🌟 Ask yourself: who in your career (and life!)…
- Advocates for you when you’re not in the room?
- Challenges your blind spots honestly, and with care?
- Celebrates your wins genuinely, without minimizing?
- Connects you to people and opportunities beyond your circle?
- Keeps it real as a peer who gets it, because they’re in it too?
If everyone around you is a cheerleader, who’s telling you what you need to hear? And if no one’s celebrating you, what’s fueling you forward? The goal isn’t to fill slots. It’s to notice what’s missing so that you can build your own team of Avengers. 🦸🏻♀️💥
Career Success Is Built With the Right People
Career success isn’t the reward for figuring it out alone. It’s built with the right people around you. And those wider, looser ties? They’re the ones that move careers forward, faster. ✨
🎯So here’s today’s challenge: think of one person outside your closest circle—someone you’ve met once, an old colleague, an alum you’ve never reached out to—and message them this week.
