Work That Leaves You More Skilled

Some jobs spend a skill. Others accumulate it.

Early in a career, what helps most is an environment where a person:

• solves increasingly difficult problems;
• gets feedback;
• sees strong specialists at work;
• understands the whole system;
• can make mistakes at a controlled scale;
• picks up portable tools.

A high salary in a job without development can be a sensible choice, especially if a person needs money, stability or a rest from intensive growth. Not every period of life has to become an educational project.

A long professional standstill does create a risk, though. Technologies change, organisations close, and narrow in-house experience may turn out to be useless outside.

It is worth asking once a year:

• what am I now better at;
• which tasks can I handle on my own;
• which of that has value outside the current company;
• which knowledge is going out of date;
• what should I learn next.

Work you could be proud of in front of your grandchildren sounds fine, but not everyone wants grandchildren, and not every decent job makes a good family story.

A different criterion is more accurate:

Can I explain to myself why I do this work and what it does to people, to the world and to me?

The answer doesn’t have to be heroic.

Sometimes decent work consists of making sure the heating system runs reliably in winter. That is not a bad story, even if the grandchild would have preferred dinosaurs.

Work that spends a skill is recognisable by one sign: a year on, the person does the same thing, only faster. Speed is a pleasant sensation and a poor indicator. A manager who has run one type of deal in one industry for three years ends up not with three years of experience but with one year repeated three times. In an interview you hear it immediately: the account of the work doesn’t grow more complex, only the sums and the client names change.

It is easier to check by the questions you can now ask than by job title or number of projects. If no new question has appeared in a year, the job paid in money, not in qualification. That is a legitimate exchange; it is just worth knowing that it took place.