Stepping Stones in Your Career

Originally published on March 15, 2018 at www.linkedin.com.

I have worked with hundreds of MBA students over the years who came to NYU Stern hoping to make both an industry AND functional career switch. And one of the most rewarding parts of my job as a career coach has been seeing these ambitious moves come to fruition. Look no further than Jon Cook, for example. Jon is a former science teacher (and PhD in Physiology) who enrolled in the MBA program at Stern and managed to land a full-time role in management consulting after graduation. Or consider Evelyn Zhang, a former U.S. Army Officer who, like Jon, enrolled at Stern with no corporate experience and now works in a partnerships role for a major technology company’s entertainment and media division.

Clearly, the Stern MBA experience helped transform Jon and Evelyn’s careers*. But what ties their stories together — and dozens more like them — is not just their sheer talent or some inherent magic associated with the full-time MBA experience. In my view, the biggest commonality between them is that they were willing to make incremental short-term moves at Stern in order to position themselves for longer-term professional success. They each took advantage of what we in the Office of Career Development call Stepping Stones to pull off their wholesale career transformations.

Put simply, a Stepping Stone is an intermediate step toward a larger goal.

In Jon’s case, a summer internship with the Clinton Foundation in Haiti — an opportunity he secured late in the spring of his MBA1 year — positioned him for success in consulting recruiting during his second year at Stern. In Evelyn’s case, a sequence of internships — beginning with an in-semester project management role at Disney-ABC Television during her first year and continuing with a summer internship experience at Showtime — put her in a position to be hired into a major media company’s leadership development program after graduation.

A good Stepping Stone experience allows you to capitalize on an existing functional skill — or prior industry experience — to make a crucial intermediate step toward your sought-after industry+function transition. Jon, for example, chose to remain in the non-profit sector with the Clinton Foundation, where he pivoted functionally to more consultative work over the summer. This new functional experience bolstered his candidacy for the industry switch to management consulting in his 2nd year. Evelyn, on the other hand, capitalized on her pre-MBA functional skills in project management to make her initial foray into the entertainment/media industry as an intern at Disney-ABC. This crucial industry exposure allowed her to eventually land in a new functional role (business development) in entertainment/media after graduation.

I’m starting to get confused just writing this, so here’s a simple diagram to illustrate the concept:

The Stepping Stones strategy is not revolutionary, but it is often overlooked by students who come to school with their sights set on an immediate double function AND industry career switch. While this is not an impossible goal, I encourage students to be open-minded and consider how the intermediate step(s) might pay off in the long-term.

The Stepping Stones strategy is also not restricted to internships, by the way. There are countless more examples of Stern alumni who took a post-graduation position initially in either a new industry or function as an intermediate step before completing the industry+function switch in the years that followed. Maybe that will be the focus of a future article.

In any event, I invite you to consider how Stepping Stones might facilitate your own career transition. Thank you for reading, and, as always, I welcome your comments and thoughts below.

*I owe a HUGE thanks to Jon and Evelyn for giving me permission to highlight their stories in this piece.