Career planning is often considered a crucial step for success — relaying professional ambition into a purposeful long-term reality. But the 30-year roadmap is becoming increasingly ineffective in today’s fast-paced, volatile world. Many careers have been made obsolete over the past few years while others find themselves taking up hitherto unknown professions. Against this backdrop, a suggestion from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen remains extremely relevant.
“The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you’ll enter, what companies you’ll work for, what roles you’ll have, where you’ll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world. You’ll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can’t possibly predict any of it,” he wrote in a 2007 blog post.
The well-known businessman argued that trying to plan a career was an “exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate” people. It could also make them blind to the “really significant opportunities that life will throw your way”. Andreessen wrote that career planning was equivalent to “career limiting”.
“The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities. Opportunities are key. I would argue that opportunities fall loosely into two buckets: those that present themselves to you, and those that you go out and create. Both will be hugely important to your career,” he opined.
Andreessen noted that opportunities were often the consequence of “being in the right place at the right time” and required people to respond quickly or miss out. He also touched upon opportunities that one could actively seek out or create — noting that life was ‘too short’ to avoid taking that leap of faith.
“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think,” he opined.