We’ve Been Teaching People the Wrong Thing About Careers
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In the first post in this series, I shared what happened when I achieved my dream job and still felt lost. After I left that CEO role, people kept asking me a very reasonable question:
What are you going to do next?
It made sense. That’s what we ask people when they’re in transition. What’s next? What job are you looking for? What kind of role do you want? Where do you think you will land?
But the more people asked me that question, the more I realized I didn’t know how to answer it. Not because I was incapable, not because I lacked experience, and not because I had nothing to offer. But because “What are you going to do next?” wasn’t actually the question I needed to answer first.
I didn’t just need to figure out my next job. I needed to understand what I was building now. And that’s where I think we have gotten careers wrong.
A Job Is Where You Work. A Career Is What You Are Building.
For most of our lives, we are taught to think about careers in terms of jobs.
What job do you want? What job are you applying for? What job did you get? What is your job title? What is your next move?
From a young age, the conversation about our professional lives is usually organized around a role, a title, a company, or the next step on the ladder. And jobs matter. A job gives you structure, income, responsibility, experience, stability, opportunity, and a place to contribute.
But a job is not the same thing as a career. A job is a role. A career is the body of work you are building over time.
It’s the collection of experiences, skills, relationships, decisions, values, contributions, pivots, risks, lessons, and seasons that shape who you become professionally. A job is one chapter, your career is the story. Too often, we treat the chapter (aka the job) as if it were the whole book.
We Teach People How to Get a Job
Most career advice focuses on getting the job. Build the resume. Update the LinkedIn profile. Prepare for the interview. Negotiate the offer. Make the right impression. Get promoted. Say yes to the opportunity. Climb the ladder.
And to be clear, those things matter. They are useful and necessary at different points in our lives, but they are not enough. Because knowing how to get a job is not the same as knowing how to build a meaningful career.
You can be excellent at achieving the next step and still have no real clarity about where those steps are taking you. You can be highly capable, well-respected, and successful on paper, while quietly wondering whether the path you’re on still fits the life you want to live. You can keep moving forward and still feel like you’re drifting.
I see this with leaders all the time.
They know how to perform. They know how to achieve. They know how to be responsible, useful, impressive, and needed, but when the conversation shifts from “What do you do?” to “What are you building?” things get quieter.
Because that is a different kind of question and it requires a different kind of clarity.
“What’s Next?” Is Not Always the Right Question
When we are conditioned to think about careers as a series of jobs, we often default to asking:
What’s next?
The next promotion. The next title. The next company. The next opportunity. The next level of responsibility.
But “next” isn’t always the same as “right.”
Sometimes the next step is obvious, but not aligned to where you want to go. Sometimes it looks impressive, but it costs more than we want to give. Sometimes it gives us more authority, but less energy. Sometimes it expands our influence, but pulls us further away from the work that actually feels meaningful. Sometimes it’s exactly what we thought we wanted, until we get there and realize we never stopped to ask why we wanted it in the first place.
That’s how people end up in careers they worked hard to build, but no longer recognize. Not because they made bad choices, but because they made choices using an incomplete set of questions.
The Question Underneath the Job
Instead of only asking, “What job do I want next?” we need to ask a deeper question:
What is this job helping me build?
That question changes everything, because the same job can mean very different things depending on what it is building in your career.
For one person, a demanding leadership role may be building confidence, credibility, influence, and strategic experience. For another person, that same kind of role may drain their energy, disconnect them from their values, and keep them from the work they actually want to do.
For one person, staying in a role may be a strategic choice because it provides stability during a season when life needs more space. But for another person, staying may be a way of avoiding the fear of making a change.
Your job title alone never tells the whole story. The better question is whether the role is helping you build the career, life, leadership, and impact you actually want.
Try This: The Job vs. Career Audit
If you are trying to understand whether your current role still fits, start here.
Take a few minutes and answer these questions honestly:
- What is my current job asking from me?
- What is this role helping me build?
- What strengths am I using regularly?
- What strengths, interests, or values are being underused?
- What reputation am I building through this work?
- What opportunities is this role preparing me for?
- What opportunities might this role be keeping me from?
- Is this job aligned with the career I want to be building now?
But don’t stop with the reflection.
Reflection creates awareness, but the interpretation of that reflection creates movement.
Once you answer the questions, look for the pattern. Is your current job building your career, borrowing from your career, or blocking your career?
Is Your Job Building, Borrowing, or Blocking?
Building
Your job is building your career when it is helping you grow in the direction you actually want to go. It may still be hard. It may still require effort, sacrifice, and stretch. But there is a connection between what the role asks of you and what you are trying to build.
Your job may be building your career if:
- You are using strengths you want to be known for.
- You are gaining skills, relationships, visibility, or credibility that matter for your future.
- The work is challenging, but still connected to something meaningful.
- You can name how this role is preparing you for what you want next.
If your job is building your career, the next step is not necessarily to leave the role or the organization. The next step is to become more intentional. A building role should not be left to chance. It should be leveraged with intention.
- What do you want to deepen?
- What opportunity do you need to ask for?
- What relationship, project, skill, or visibility would make this role even more aligned with your career goals?
- How can you use this role to build toward the career and life you want?
Borrowing
Your job is borrowing from your career when it gives you something useful, but also takes more than it gives. That does not automatically mean the job is wrong. Sometimes a role gives you income, stability, flexibility, benefits, credibility, or breathing room in a season when those things matter. That can be a strategic choice. But borrowing becomes a problem when you do not realize it is happening.
Your job may be borrowing from your career if:
- You are grateful for the role, but not energized by it.
- You are successful, but feel like you are coasting or performing.
- You are staying because it is safe, stable, familiar, or hard to explain leaving.
- You can name what the job gives you, but not what it is helping you build.
If your job is borrowing from your career, the next step is to be honest.
- What is the tradeoff?
- What are you getting?
- What is it costing?
- Is this a strategic season, or are you staying because you are afraid to move?
There are times when borrowing is necessary. But it should be a choice, not a default.
Blocking
Your job is blocking your career when it is actively keeping you from growing into the next version of your work, leadership, or life. A blocking role does not always look terrible from the outside. In fact, it may look impressive. It may come with a good title, good compensation, and plenty of responsibility. But internally, you can feel the cost.
Your job may be blocking your career if:
- You are consistently underusing the strengths you want to build on.
- You feel smaller, quieter, or less confident than you used to.
- You are too depleted to imagine what comes next.
- You are staying mostly because you do not know where else you would go.
- The role requires sacrifices you are no longer willing to make.
If your job is blocking your career, the next step is not always to quit immediately. The first step is to name what is blocked.
- Is it growth?
- Voice?
- Flexibility?
- Compensation?
- Values?
- Leadership?
- Creativity?
- Energy?
Once you know what is blocked, you can decide whether to redesign the role, advocate for something different, or begin planning a transition. But you cannot change what you have not named.
The Career Underneath the Job
This is the work we do not often teach people to do. We teach people how to apply, interview, perform, achieve, and advance. But we do not always teach them how to pause and ask:
- What is this role doing to the career underneath it?
- Is it helping me become more of who I want to be?
- Is it moving me toward the kind of work, life, leadership, and impact I actually want?
- Or am I confusing motion with direction?
This distinction matters because you can be very busy without building toward anything. You can be very successful and not be aligned with your future goals. You can be very needed and still be stuck. You can be very good at your job and still know it’s no longer the right chapter for you.
Start With What You Are Building
The goal is not to make every career decision perfectly. That’s not realistic. Careers are full of experiments, seasons, tradeoffs, surprises, and pivots. But we can make more intentional decisions. We can stop asking only, “What job do I want next?” And start asking, “What am I building now?”
That question creates a different kind of clarity. It helps us see whether a role is building, borrowing, or blocking the career we actually want. And once we can see that clearly, we can make stronger choices, not just about the next job, but about the career we are building underneath it.
Jessica Gendron is a leadership expert, CEO of The Center for Leadership Excellence, and author of What It Takes to Shatter Glass. She helps leaders and organizations build careers, cultures, and workplaces with greater clarity, confidence, and intention.