Open or shut: On navigating your career one door at a time

Happy International Women’s Day!?

Let me start with a confession: I have a minor obsession with photographing doors. Call it my weird hobby.

I thought I’d combine this occasion and my love of doors to share some hard-won advice to my fellow women in tech (and beyond!) about navigating your career one door at a time.

? Check out my collection of shareable door quotes ?

Who am I?

I’m Jennifer Petoff but my friends call me Dr. J.?

Why Dr. J? I have a Ph.D. in Chemistry and started my career in the lab working on things that could start on fire or explode if exposed to air. I also really like sports like American football and ice hockey. Unlike the original Dr. J, I am less into basketball.

My job today is equally exciting, just in a less physically dangerous way. I currently lead the global Google Cloud Platform and Technical Infrastructure education team at Google. I’m also one of the co-editors of the original Site Reliability Engineering Book that Google published in 2016.?

I love to travel and I’m a part-time travel blogger at Sidewalk Safari.

How Did I Get Here?

So, you may be wondering: how did I get from there to here? From wearing a labcoat and safety goggles with things starting on fire when you expose them to air to leading an education team for Google SRE and beyond.?

Looking at it from the outside, my career does not look very intentional. Some might even argue that it looks like a random walk. Take a look at my Linkedin profile and you’ll see what I mean.

However, if you take time to look closer, you’ll find that’s not the case at all. I got here by following my personal guiding star.

What is a personal guiding star? A guiding star is your motivation. Stated simply: what do you get excited about?

For me, my guiding star is:

I want to travel as much as possible and live in cool places

I have used this guiding star to shape my career decisions. Would a certain choice take me closer or further away from that guiding star? As an additional guiding principle, I look at work as being in service to my life rather than living in service to work.

Career Doorspiration

In addition to following my guiding star, I also very carefully navigated a series of doors representing opportunities both expected and unexpected. Now let’s dive into some door-themed inspiration, aka DOORspiration!.

I believe my points are useful whether you are just starting out in your career, you’ve been working for decades, or anywhere in between.

“Push open the doors of opportunity and follow the light of your guiding star” –Jennifer Petoff (with help from Gemini)

I think that oftentimes people and especially women feel bound by the conventions of society. I have found it helpful to pay attention to my inner compass more than the so-called rules and expectations that society may have of me.

When I was in graduate school, I was really only aware of two options available to me: go do a post-doc and then become a professor (hopefully!) or take an industry research job. Neither one of those was particularly well-suited to my guiding star to travel and live different places.?

It was only when I took that industry research job and was able to explore some ancillary interests that a huge range of opportunities poured forth and took me on this really incredible journey.

The door to success is always open to those who are willing to work hard.?

Graduate school is a formative experience.

Being a graduate student teaches you a lot of things:

• The Scientific Method: Developing a hypothesis to test, setting up experiments, how to launch and iterate.
• Analysis: Drawing conclusions with data.
• Observation: How to see and document the world and look for clues.

But most importantly, graduate school teaches Perseverance.

90+% of what you try in research doesn’t work but you need to stick with it.

When something doesn’t go to plan, you need to troubleshoot, figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.

By being willing to work hard and learn these lessons, I made it through my chemistry Ph.D. program in 4 years.

If you're curious, my thesis was titled Homo- and Copolymerization Studies Using Bis(2-arylindenyl)metallocene Catalysts : Mechanistic Investigations and Production of Polyolefin Elastomers with Unique Properties.

That's a mouthful!

Even though I don’t use the deep knowledge and subject matter expertise of my degree anymore, I carry this lesson with me to this day: the door to success is always open to those who are willing to work hard.

Sometimes you find a door in the place you least expect.?

Early in my career, I was a chemist working in research. Imagine my surprise when I got a ping on Linkedin in late 2006 asking if I was interested in discussing a University Programs role at Google. GOOGLE! [This was a big deal back then and I was excited...]?

My first thought was, “why is Google interested in a chemist?” I could have easily said, “no, I’m not interested”, but frankly I was curious. I had a conversation with the recruiter and the next thing you know, I was talking to the hiring manager. Then I was flying out to California to the Googleplex (getting more excited with each passing minute, by the way).?

I got an offer in 2007 and because I was willing to see and walk through that door in a place I didn’t expect, I took my career in a new and exciting direction in the Tech industry (all in service to my guiding star, by the way).

When one door closes, another opens.?

This quote is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell.?

By 2009, I felt like I’d learned all that I could on the University Programs team and that I was stagnating a bit in my career; I was no longer growing.?

It was time to move on.

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After I had this realization, how did I approach the situation? I started knocking on a lot of doors; having conversations, exploring opportunities, positioning my transferable skills.?

As challenging as it can be to make a wholesale career pivot, I can confidently say that I would not be sitting where I am today had it not been for that moment. From challenge comes opportunity! Another door opened, I passed through, and a myriad of other doors opened up as a result down the line.

Opportunity knocks…?

…at least some of the time, so listen carefully. You’ll recall that my guiding star involves travel and living in cool places. I was working in Google’s DoubleClick division when one of the senior leaders at the time launched a one year rotation program that would send a select number of high potential leaders on an international assignment.

I heard opportunity knocking on the door and you better believe that I answered. I applied for a role in London and a role in Dublin. I landed the assignment in Ireland.

The door to opportunity is always open to those who are willing to take a chance.

When I received the offer of a one year assignment in Dublin, I had never set foot in Ireland before.?

I was a little scared, but I figured, “for a year, how bad can it be?” I took the leap and moved to Dublin. I loved it! Even better, that turned out to be a decision that unlocked many future opportunities that I was able to find and seize.

If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.?

So said Milton Berle.

I couldn’t agree more. My one year assignment in Dublin turned into a 4 year stint as a project manager on the AdWords Global Customer Services team. I really loved living in Ireland and I wanted to stay. However, after 4 years I felt that it was time to move on. I had essentially outgrown the job I was in.?

I worked my network, I explored the org chart. I cold-called people on different teams at Google in Dublin. I even volunteered to co-lead a project celebrating Google’s 15th birthday because it would give me the chance to meet and work with different people that I’d not ordinarily have the chance to work with.?

This approach effectively built a door for me that opened into Google’s Site Reliability Engineering team.

A door is never closed to those who know how to knock

Ask for what you believe you deserve. I remember after we published the SRE Book, I wanted to go for promotion as a means of achieving some recognition for that accomplishment. In this case, the norm would have been that I needed more time to make my case.?

You can’t get a promotion that fast!?

I persisted in knocking on the door. I told the story of the impact of the book. I backed up my assertions with data. I continued to knock, and you know what? The door opened and I got my promotion.

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door. – Kyle Chandler

I agree with Kyle Chandler, sometimes opportunity does not knock, but rather it presents itself when you beat down the door. Sometimes you have to fight to get what you want and the recognition that you deserve.

I work in the technical learning and development space. It turns out that this is an area that can be fraught with unconscious bias. It often seems to me that people think: “Oh, running training programs is easy. I created a one hour tech talk one time, no problem! How hard can it be?”?

L&D is often looked at as ‘fluffy’ and unmeasurable. It’s not an area where it’s easy to advance your career. That said, I am a director of an engineering learning and development org and I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve been able to get here.?

How did I do it? I had to beat down the door with data. I went to great lengths to get creative on how we quantify and measure program impact and to tell the story in terms that matter to the business.

I think it can be helpful to view the things you’re working on through this lens.

Be willing to close a door on a chapter of your life.

I have to say, I was very happy living in Dublin. The door game is definitely strong there ??

That said, after being there for 12 years and having lived through 2 years of pandemic lockdown, it felt like it was time for something new.?

I had to be willing to close a door on a chapter of my life to reinvigorate my life, my career, and open myself up to new experiences.

That’s why I decided to move to Portugal in 2022. If I hadn’t been willing to close out my Dublin chapter (at least for now), the door to this entirely different and super-amazing life experience would have remained unrealized.

Don’t let the door hit you (in the you know what ??) on the way out!

Let me take this in a slightly different direction for a moment. My mom was always fond of the saying, “don’t let the door hit you…in the you know what… on the way out!”

This is not advice for yourself, but rather a mantra to apply to toxic people. In work and in life, you’ll encounter annoying or even toxic people. They are a job hazard. They are a life hazard.?

I’ve found that the best approach is to move in the opposite direction and get them out of your life. Shut the door firmly behind them.

Sometimes someone like this will appear dangling an interesting career opportunity. If you see warning signs of toxicity, turn down the opportunity and show them the door. Other, better opportunities will surely come.

Remember that the door to happiness swings inward.

I’ll leave you with this. Remember that the door to happiness swings inward. Trust your heart, trust your gut, and the rest will follow.

Be an opener of doors

I’d like to conclude with a question to the women who have found some measure of success so far in their careers and the allies who are in a position to support all the up and coming women in tech:?

Will you hold the door open for those behind you?

Or, will you lock the door and put your guards on duty?

“Be an opener of doors” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

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If you enjoyed the career advice in this article, follow me on Linkedin. If you are a fellow door fan, check out Doors, Glorious Doors by Sidewalk Safari or my Instagram. ??