Good Career Advice
Most career advice is a trap. 'Follow your passion' and 'climb the ladder' are outdated ideas. Here's how to find fulfilling work in the modern world.
By Tony Musso on
Your parents, partners, and strangers at weddings all love giving career advice. Everyone from your closest family to that bloke you met at a wedding feels qualified to weigh in. And most of it, though well-meaning, is pretty useless. The worst piece of advice I ever got was from a university careers advisor. I was fizzing with ideas - maybe journalism, maybe starting a weird little bookshop, maybe moving to Berlin. He looked at my grades, my CV, and said with a sigh, “Have you considered a graduate scheme in logistics? It’s very stable.”
I could feel my soul shrivel. He wasn’t interested in me. He was interested in a box, and whether I could be neatly folded up and placed inside it. It took me years to realise that his advice wasn’t just bad for me, it was bad in principle. Because it was based on a lie: the idea that there’s a single ‘right’ path for everyone, and a good, stable job is the ultimate prize.
Standard career tips are often stuck in an era of 40-year tenures and guaranteed pensions. We are still following rules from an era when you could [stay at one company for forty years](/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-your-first-job-before-moving-on "How long should you stay in your first job?") and retire with a pension. It turns out, [good career advice isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula](/blog/why-most-career-advice-fails "Why most career advice fails (and what works instead)"). Effective advice helps you understand how your specific strengths fit into the modern job market.
The Problem With Most Career Advice
Think about the classic career tropes. “Follow your passion.” “Climb the career ladder.” “Just get a foot in the door.” They sound good, but they’re flimsy in the real world.
Telling someone to "follow their passion" is risky if that passion doesn't pay the bills. What if your passion is 18th-century pottery and it doesn’t pay the bills? What if you have multiple passions? What if you don’t even know what your passion is? For most of us, passion isn’t a lightning bolt, it’s a slow burn. It’s something you develop by getting good at something that matters to you, not something you follow blindly into potential poverty.
“Climb the career ladder” assumes there is a ladder to climb. For our parents’ generation, maybe there was. You start in the mailroom, you become a junior, a senior, a manager, a director, and you retire with a carriage clock. Modern careers are fluid, involving side steps into new industries or temporary pauses to learn new skills. You swing sideways, you climb down to try a different section, you hang out on one bar for a while to build your strength. The ladder is an illusion. Obsessing over it can leave you feeling stuck and perpetually behind.
And “just get a foot in the door”? It can work, but it can also lead you a long way down a path you never wanted to be on. Five years later you wake up in a [well-paid, respectable job that makes you feel hollowed-out](/blog/how-to-know-if-youre-in-the-wrong-career-in-your-20s "7 signs you're in the wrong career in your 20s"), wondering how you got there. Your foot is in the door, but your heart is somewhere else entirely.
This kind of advice fails because it ignores the most important person in the equation: you. It ignores your specific motivations and what you actually want to spend forty hours a week doing.
Good Career Advice Starts With You
Useful advice provides a framework for making decisions rather than a rigid set of instructions. "" It doesn’t give you the answers, it helps you ask the right questions. The first and most important question is: “Who am I?”
Self-analysis works best when you focus on tangible patterns in your past behavior. At TonyKnows, we sometimes talk about your ‘Work DNA’ - the [innate traits and drivers that make you, you](/assessment "Take the career assessment to find your Work DNA"). You can start to figure this out by looking for patterns in your life.
Forget job titles for a moment. Think about activities. When do you feel most energised? Most engaged? Most like yourself?
- Was it when you were organising that huge group holiday, coordinating all the moving parts?
- Was it when you spent a whole weekend lost in a complex spreadsheet, trying to find the story in the data?
- Was it when you were teaching your friend a new skill, and saw the lightbulb go on in their eyes?
- Was it when you were building something with your hands, solving a physical problem?
These moments reveal your natural strengths. "" The organiser might [thrive in project management](/careers/project-manager "Career profile: Project Manager"). The spreadsheet wizard could be a brilliant analyst. The teacher might be a great manager or coach. The builder might love a trade or engineering.
Good career advice doesn’t tell you to be a project manager. It helps you realise that you love bringing order to chaos, and then helps you explore the different ways you could do that for a living. The focus is on the ‘what’, not the ‘who’. What do you want to do, day-to-day? The job title is just a label that comes later.
It’s About Direction, Not Destination
The idea that you will [choose one career and stick with it](/blog/career-advice-for-your-20s-how-to-choose-the-right-path "Career advice for your 20s: How to choose the right path") for 50 years is dead. "" What a terrifying amount of pressure to put on your 21-year-old self.
A modern career is a series of sprints and experiments. You try something, you learn, you grow, and you use that learning to inform your next move. The goal is not to find the ‘perfect job’ right away. The goal is to find the next interesting challenge. It’s about momentum, not perfection.
This is why it’s so important to stop thinking in terms of final destinations. Where do you want to be in five years? It’s a pointless question. You don’t know who you’ll be in five years. You don’t know what the world will look like.
A much better question is: “What do I want to learn next?”
What skill could you build in the next 18 months that would make you indispensable to more employers? Maybe it’s getting comfortable with public speaking. Maybe it’s learning a specific software. Maybe it’s understanding how to read a balance sheet.
Focus on collecting specific skills you can carry with you, like data analysis or technical writing, rather than just collecting job titles. Each job is a platform for learning. When you stop learning, it might be time to look for a new platform. This approach takes the pressure off. You’re not failing if you change careers. [Moving from marketing to teaching](/careers/teacher "Career profile: Teacher") or coding to sales is often a necessary evolution, not a mistake. You’re just collecting skills and experiences, becoming more valuable and more interesting with every move you make.
Seek Mentors, Not Gurus
Career paths are too personal for a standard template to work for everyone. Anyone who claims they can is a charlatan. What people can give you is their perspective. They can share their story - the wins, the losses, the lucky breaks, the stupid mistakes.
This is the real value of mentorship. A mentor isn’t a guru who hands down wisdom from on high. A mentor is a guide who walks alongside you for a little while. They can’t tell you which path to take, but they can point out the potholes in the one they took. If you're looking for good career advice, seek out these stories.
Who do you know that has a career that intrigues you? It doesn’t have to be someone super senior or famous. It could be a friend of a friend, a former colleague, someone you follow on LinkedIn. Reach out to them. Don’t ask, “What should I do with my life?” That’s an impossible question.
Instead, ask for their story. Try questions like:
- “What’s your favourite thing about the work you do?”
- “What was the most pivotal or unexpected move in your career?”
- “What do you wish you’d known when you were starting out?”
- “What’s the hardest part of your job that people don’t see?”
Message people on LinkedIn with a specific question about their role to secure a 20-minute Zoom call. Collect these stories. Each specific experience helps you refine your list of must-haves for your next role. You’ll start to see patterns, identify things that resonate with you, and rule out things that don’t. This is career research in its purest form.
What to do next
Identifying these patterns is the first step toward making a practical change. Doing something about it is harder. If you’re feeling a bit stuck, or like the old advice isn’t working for you, here are three simple things you can try this week. Don’t just think about them - actually do them. Block out the time.
- **Do a ‘Good Day’ audit.** Open a notebook. Think back over the last few months, at work and outside it. Write down three specific moments where you felt truly alive, engaged and in ‘flow’. What were you doing? Who were you with? What problem were you solving? Don’t judge it, just write it down. These are your clues.
- **Define your next learning goal.** Forget five-year plans. What’s one skill you could start learning *this month* that feels genuinely interesting and useful? Find a course, read a book, watch some tutorials. Take one small, concrete step towards building that skill.
- **Ask for a story.** Identify one person whose career path seems interesting. Send them a polite, brief email or LinkedIn message. Say you admire their journey and would love to hear their story, if they could spare 15 minutes for a virtual coffee. Ask them good questions, and then just listen.
Testing these patterns in real roles is the most reliable way to figure out your next move. Instead of waiting for a dream role, test your interest by building a basic website or completing a 4-week data analytics certification. Each small move gives you the data you need to pivot or commit to a new direction. And it’s how you build a career that doesn’t just look good on paper, but feels good to live.