By Randy Rayess
Growing up, our parents expected us to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. We believed that careers were forever and we would grow in our chosen firms for the next 30 years.
Today, we rarely find that our peers have stayed at a single company for more than 5 years. Increased access to technology has changed our options immensely. A global, hyper-connected marketplace provides us with limitless opportunities. Although this initially seems like an improvement, it forces us to make tough decisions.
Mentors often give us seemingly excellent advice on how to make career decisions: security, stability and cold hard cash are usually what we’re taught to look for.
Instead of relying on these metrics, I recommend basing your decisions on the opportunity to learn.
Early in my career, I found myself facing a crossroad: I could accept a position at a world-renowned private equity firm, or work on an idea where I saw immense opportunity. I chose entrepreneurship. When facing tough career decisions, the four things to look for are:
A Challenging Role
Choosing a challenging role will push you to your true potential. In our case, when we started a company focused on remote software development, we needed to optimize remote work engagements across multiple time zones and do extensive research on screening and hiring software developers. Instead of being overwhelmed by this task, we found it exciting to work on difficult problems and learn something new every day.
Talented
The people you surround yourself with are crucial to growth -- both yours and your company’s. When choosing a career path, I recommend you work with motivated and highly talented teams who share your goals. My co-founder Pratham Mittal, a great friend from college, had a similar curiosity about the world and shared the same vision for the future of technology.
When joining an existing team, look for mentors within the company. Meeting the founders and tenured employees can help you assess the company's culture and its mentorship potential. You want to be confident that you can learn from the team, and that you would want the founders and senior executives as future mentors.
Passion
Passionate employees create a great work environment. When evaluating a potential job offer (or the decision to pursue entrepreneurship), it is important to question whether the role and team will foster your interests and passions. Does the company vision excite you? Do the company values align with your own personal morals? These questions can be helpful in determining if a job will be the right fit.
A Promising Business
When considering a role -- or a business idea -- evaluate your career trajectory. Do you think you will be able to grow with the business? We created VenturePact to help companies better leverage software by connecting them with the best software development teams around the world. We felt this would alleviate industry pain points, and reshape the way software is built.
A strict focus on your bank account can lead to decisions that are short-sighted and often sacrifice learning opportunities.
Jeff Bezos used a "regret minimization framework” to make his career decision when choosing between the financial industry and his startup, Amazon. Jeff believes that you should make decisions based on what you think would minimize your regret at age 80. This framework increases your risk tolerance by shifting your perspective to emphasize a longer-term focus.
And when Sheryl Sandberg was choosing between
Randy Rayess is the co-founder of VenturePact, a marketplace that connects companies to prescreened software development firms; he previously worked in private equity at SilverLake Partners and in machine learning.
