Career Advice for Your 20s: Navigating a Changing World of Work

Three years ago, I wrote an article called “Making the Most of Your 20s: A CEO’s Checklist for Accelerating Your Career.” My advice boiled down to four main points:

1) Search for an opportunity where you can have meaningful impact.

2) Prioritize your own learning and development to prepare for a rapidly changing world.

3) Find a place where you’ll enjoy the work and the people—where the organization’s purpose and values resonate with who you are.

4) Look for an environment that gives you balance over time, based on your specific needs.

Since writing that article, the world has changed a lot. It is more complex on many dimensions, and we are seeing massive change from digitization, advanced analytics, and the availability of incredible amounts of information. I wanted to look at this changing world of work—at BCG and beyond—and what it means for young people in the early stages of their careers. I recently sat down to discuss this with two colleagues from BCG’s New York office—Tom Reichert, senior partner, global leader of DigitalBCG, and chair of the firm’s practice areas; and Jeanne Bickford, senior partner and leader of BCG’s New York office, home to a vibrant mix of consultants, data scientists, designers, and engineers. These are the themes that stood out.

A New Sense of Speed and Scale

One of the biggest changes in work has to do with speed—both in terms of how quickly we can reach goals with clients and how fast we are required to learn along the way. Young people joining BCG become members of cross-functional teams on day one, working to build businesses that have to be delivered in less than a year.

For example, several years ago, the digital transformation of a telecom company—a companywide effort that involves major people and technology change—would have taken three to five years. Today, results are expected to start coming in 6 to 12 months—with teams of consultants, designers, and engineers working in an agile way to deliver solutions at breakneck speed.

And the reach we have today—the scale of our solutions—is dramatically different. We recently worked with a large consumer company with more than 13 million loyalty-card members. Initially, the company was sending an email to each segment of 400,000-plus customers every week—that is, 30 different emails. The company embraced advanced analytics and machine learning and within seven months was able to send individualized emails—more than 400,000 variations every week.

Broader Perspectives, Greater Learning

Years ago, you typically worked with colleagues who came from similar backgrounds and who followed the same general process for solving problems. Such teams often worked together seamlessly, thinking about and structuring their approach to challenges in similar ways.

What’s exciting now is being in a team room filled with people from a variety of backgrounds: startup folks, designers, software engineers, scientists, and traditional consultants. Everyone has to come together and talk the challenges through, contributing a much broader range of ideas, perspectives, and methods for problem solving. It’s not always easy at first, but the final results are superior.

Plus, it’s a great learning experience for everyone involved. As a consultant, you may know an industry well—or even several industries. But when you get the chance to work on a team with data scientists or designers for six months, you end up with new skills and the ability to look at problems from different vantage points. Further, when you find yourself in the position of having to change the minds of others with very different backgrounds—because sometimes your own expertise makes that necessary—you learn the best way to do that. And those are skills that will make you a better, more agile leader wherever your career may take you.

Career Advice in Changing Times

Look for apprenticeship at the core. With the fast changes in the nature of work and how people and technology will interact in the years ahead, our own personal growth is the essential underpinning of a successful career. Apprenticeship is a practice that helps each of us—young people in particular—evolve in their careers at an accelerated rate. It also enriches the work environment and creates more fulfilling careers for leaders. At BCG, apprenticeship is embedded in the responsibilities of leading a team and being a great colleague to others—with clients and in our internal activities. This can involve helping colleagues learn to ask the right questions, develop new ways of problem solving, or navigating how to orchestrate a major change program. But a leader also serves as a role model when she’s learning from the data scientist in the room, for example, and applying new knowledge to the challenge at hand. Even in a position of leadership, the most effective approach can sometimes be to take on the role of a follower—all of which adds richness to the concept of apprenticeship.

Find a place that makes balance possible. This advice remains apt. It may not be top of mind when you’re in your 20s, but things change. At the start of your career, you may be energized to work long, unpredictable hours on exciting projects or to seek out travel around the world. But once you have kids, have parents to care for, or develop passions outside of work, you may need more flexibility. Look for organizations that respect the value of flexibility and give you the chance to achieve the balance you need by switching to part-time, for instance, or working remotely. You’ll thrive in your career if you have the support you need to make your job work for you.

 Be able to be yourself. It’s as important as ever to find an environment in which you feel passionate and excited about coming to work every day. But that means being somewhere where you can bring your authentic, full self to every aspect of the work you do. When you find a work environment that allows for that—a place where you feel included and supported in your own learning and career goals—then you will have the greatest impact and find the most satisfaction in your job.

Get ready to learn. In my discussion with Tom and Jeanne, we kept coming back to the incredible rate of change in the world today. You will get the most from your career if you maintain a mindset of continuous learning—open to developing new skills and discovering paths that take you to unexpected places. From the beginning of your career, understand that there will always be more to learn—however many decades you work. What fun!