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Your career arc is based on perception. It’s not an actual thing you can plot on a graph and say, “Look, here’s my trajectory.” We like to think so. We say that we’re climbing the ladder or taking the next step. Sure, you can quantify your career with your salary. But when your resume or CV is viewed by a search committee or you explain the progression of your career in an interview, you’re attempting to match abstract ideas of where you’re going and why this job is a good fit. It’s interpretive.
Instead of thinking there’s only one approach to tell your story as a job seeker — the traditional tale of upward mobility — consider two options: the funnel and the sprinkler.
The Funnel
The funnel is how most people think of their careers. You start accumulating a variety of experiences. You try different things before deciding what you want to do, and you narrow it down to a specific job. You become a specialist. It makes sense economically because specialists are rewarded for doing one thing. Just look at the health care sector.
Higher education follows the specialist system. Professors might not be rewarded financially like a thoracic surgeon, but they are incentivized to follow a long, elaborate — and expensive — path of training. They conduct novel research in subcategories of their field of study. They enter a funnel to earn tenure at a specific institution and in a specific department and they have to offer something different than everyone else lined up to make use of their Ph.D.
Outside of the professoriate, there are other higher education professionals who seek to specialize in the vast array of administrative units on college campuses. Unless you’ve already exploited a specialty and are now seeking an executive leadership position, career paths for staff positions in academia are most often directed toward being really good at one thing. As much as we consider administrative assistants as “the glue” of a department, specialists are paid more and produce valuable outputs that sustain the institution.
The Sprinkler
There is a place for generalists in higher education. I made the case for them in a previous HigherEdJobs article. Most people in higher education don’t find themselves working on a college campus after years of experimenting in other industries or honing other types of skills. But it happens, especially in professional education with professors who previously worked in the field.
People don’t like to think of themselves as generalists. We are conditioned by specialist systems unless you’re someone who works in a flat structure for a start-up company and everyone’s job title is an associate or they take turns as project managers.
The sprinkler option means you see growth. You started doing one narrow thing and then you expanded. You accumulated experiences and kept going, adding more to your portfolio. And you keep developing different skills that can be added to your quiver, rather than sharpening one tip of an arrow.
A professor seeking a tenure-track position or a staff member eyeing manager duties can use the sprinkler narrative even as they work toward one particular job. They can teach any class a department offers or supervise any employee in a division. They are versatile. And like water from a sprinkler, they can cover more ground.
Change the Narrative
As a job candidate, this doesn’t mean you walk into an interview say and that you are funneling or using a sprinkler approach. It’s how you walk the hiring manager through your career story.
You can choose between the funnel or the sprinkler right now. You don’t need to acquire more experience. It’s all in how you perceive your career and tailor your narrative in job interviews and on your application materials.
If you’re applying at an institution that’s seeking to be more resourceful and needs someone to do a little bit of everything, try changing your career story to that of a sprinkler. Emphasize the variety of accomplishments on your CV. Show growth in more than one area.
Tell the search committee how you can do more than other candidates when they ask why they should hire you.
If the job has specific criteria and there are many specialists thriving on campus, explain how you can do “X” really well and how you’ve been building your entire career to do that one job. Emphasize only your best work on your CV. Show a deliberate path toward a particular role.
Tell the search committee how you’ll deliver better quality work with better outcomes than other candidates when they ask why they should hire you.
Finality
In his bestselling book “Think Again,” organizational psychologist Adam Grant described how careers, relationships, and communities are open systems. These systems are governed by two key principles that are similar to the funnel and the sprinkler narratives. There are always multiple paths to the same end, which is known as equifinality, and the same starting point can be a path to many different ends, which is multifinality.
“We should be careful to avoid getting attached to a particular route or even a particular destination,” Grant wrote. “There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.”
Even the career tracks can be described differently, regardless of however many ends there could be. You have the power to change your career by changing jobs, and you can start doing that by changing the narrative about your career.
