Share

Climbing the corporate ladder seems like a dream.

When I spent time with people who got to the top of the ladder, I realized a hard truth: they were deeply unhappy.

For smart, young, ambitious people, climbing the corporate ladder in the traditional fashion doesn’t make much sense anymore. The threat of mass layoffs is now a daily occurrence.

Some people make the mistake of thinking I’m some lucky white guy.

Wrong.

I’ve been threatened with job loss, and been laid off more times than I can count. The most famous time? They called me into a meeting room for tea and chocolate cake. It ended in a redundancy.

Then there’s my wife. She got laid off at 7 months pregnant for being pregnant. They figured her productivity would decline so they got ahead of the curve.

They called it cost-cutting to hide their tracks.

But the all-male, grey-haired board actually doesn’t value women at all (that’s why there are no female leaders). So she copped the job loss and decided to have our daughter while unemployed.

Working in corporate has changed. There’s now a whole new way to navigate your career that you must understand. Here’s what it looks like.

1. No boss will ever give a f*ck about you

Incentives run the world.

While no boss can truly care about you because you’re a number in a spreadsheet and their livelihood depends on you being a profitable resource… if you help your boss get what they want, you can get an unfair advantage.

Find out what their KPIs are. Be a high performer. Make your boss look good in front of the leadership team.

Working for a well-known company logo no longer matters. It’s smarter to choose the right leader instead because they shape your career the most. They decide if you get time off, a bonus, or even a promotion.

Most of these privileges aren’t merit-based anymore either.

It comes down to whether they like you and they believe you can help THEM get another promotion.

Bonus: choose a leader who also loves entrepreneurship & has hopes of building a business. These leaders are built differently.

2. Career gaps mean you’re awesome

Career gaps used to be taboo.

One recruiter famously said to me, “Not being in a job for 6 months means you’re sh*t.” I’ll never forget that b*tchy witch. If you had a career gap, it meant you weren’t in high demand or you were unemployed.

Along with this mindset, you worked neat little 5-year stints at each role on your resume. Now things have changed again.

Career gaps now signal high IQ.

Smart people take sabbaticals, regularly change roles or industries, build businesses, and have employment gaps to care for children.

If you come across a recruiter or hiring manager who has an issue with career gaps, they’re a moron. Run.

3. Job hopping is smart

Working the same job at the same company until you’re 65 and retire with a bottle of wine and a gold watch is way out of fashion. No one does that anymore.

Job hopping is now the better strategy.

It’s how you:

• Learn faster

• Get pay rises faster

• Work in multiple industries

But the main reason to job hop is to keep work interesting. Because the typical career is more boring than watching seagulls eat pasta by the ocean.

Job hopping is also a survival skill. No company truly cares about employees. They’re all replaceable. Most bosses are total knobheads. And HR lie about their thriving culture which actually looks like the photo below.

Change jobs like you change underwear.

4. Never trust any employer

Employers hold all the power.

If you defy them, they can just fire you. You might think HR is there to save you. Not really. HR is there to protect the business, not take care of employees. They’ll screw anyone over who doesn’t conform to what “the business” wants.

The solution is simple. Have multiple employers. This means either becoming a freelancer/contractor, or constantly cheating on your current employer by interviewing with new ones.

Just assume you can get fired at any time and you’ll do fine.

5. Graduate from employment to self-employment

Workplace = Daycare

Business Owner = Adulthood

Start in the daycare but don’t stay there. When you work for yourself you become an