It’s not a question I’ve spent much time thinking about lately, but it was a question brought to mind when I appeared on a panel discussion for 100 business students at New York University last week. Each one of them is confronting the new career choices brought about by the Internet. It’s hard for me to relate to these kind of choices. I feel like the gorilla in this picture—some kind of more primitive form that made career decisions at the same age as these students. The world really has changed.
30 years ago, students like these wondered if they should go into sales or marketing or public relations. They wondered if they should work for a company or an agency. A few decided to go into direct marketing, but not many. They decided to focus on B2B or B2C businesses. They might have cared about which industry they worked in. It might have seemed complex at the time, but it was a far simpler set of choices than students face today.
Now, all of those choices are still in play, but it’s harder to draw stark lines on the Internet. Where is the line between sales and marketing? Or between marketing and public relations? Where does search marketing fall? Is organic search considered PR and paid search thought of as marketing? Is a search for “family restaurant” marketing while one for “pizza hut delivery manhatten” sales?
The questions themselves are dizzying. But as I thought about things more, I started to realize that I am making the same kind of decision that these business students are—in fact we are all making the same decision every day. What’s really changed in the last 30 years is that you don’t choose a career and stick with it forever. In some ways, you choose your career every day.
And it dawned on me that maybe the old categories are not important anymore. Who cares what is considered to be sales or marketing or PR? Why do you need to know? Why is it important for you to constrain what you do based on those old labels?
So when those students quite naturally asked the panel how to choose, I gave the so-helpful answer, “Whatever blows your skirt up.” I went on to explain that the winners will be the people that can draw upon whatever skill they need at the moment—sales, marketing, PR, and others, too—to solve the problem at hand. In the last 20 years, management gurus have celebrated the idea of cross-functional teams. I’d like to celebrate cross-functional people.
So each day, as you decide what you are going to read, what you are going to work on, and ultimately what you are going to learn, you are making a career decision. You are slowly choosing what you focus on. And you can change your mind and focus on something else every day. In the end, your career isn’t a label, it’s the sum total of what your knowledge, skills, and experience make it.
So what is your career going to be today?
