Take ownership of your career, please

Often, I have remarked on how important it is to own your career. And never was it more apparent a few years ago, when I came upon a Facebook post by a self-styled entrepreneur, who claimed to be the kind of boss who sends his employees for skills upgrading. He further asserted that it is the employer's responsibility to do so. Now, in all fairness, this fellow's English is less than ideal, which may account for the fact that he sounds like an obnoxious virtue-signaller. (Of course, him actually being obnoxious may be the main reason he sounds obnoxious.)

That was his assertion, and now this is mine, and I recognize that this may be an unpopular opinion, but here goes. Your career is not, and should not ever be, your employer's responsibility, no matter what they may claim. It is yours. Letting - or worse, expecting - your employer to take care of your career, is tantamount to abdicating that responsibility.

Would it be nice if your employer took care of the costs associated with pursuing your professional training? Of course. It's also potentially dangerous to allow your employer to determine what parts of your game to upgrade. You, and you alone, should be deciding the direction in which you train. And if your chosen direction does not align with that of your company, perhaps it's time you parted ways. Remember, your career will span more than one company. The company you are currently a part of, is but another step in the journey. It's not the entire journey.

Be the Captain of your ship.

If I'm going to upgrade my skills, I want to be the one to decide which skills to upgrade. Think of your career as a ship, of which you are Captain. Not your employer, not your wife, not your mother. You.

Then again, perhaps I speak from a position of privilege. I've spent my entire career ensuring as much as possible that I am not beholden to any one employer beyond the terms of our contract. And I have the luxury of knowing I have a healthy bank balance, and other income, to pay for the costs of my decisions. Everything I say assumes that you enjoy similar privileges - that you are not in a position where you are underqualified and therefore at the complete mercy of your employer in order to stay employed.

And if that's the case, if indeed you are in that kind of position, you should absolutely eat whatever your employer graciously gives you, and be properly grateful for it, peasant.

Your Employer's Responsibility

Getting back to the subject of your skill upgrades being the employer's responsibility...

Employers control many things. In particular, they control whether or not you are employed at their company. They, to some extent, control your working conditions, and whether or not you are able to pay your bills. The more people they employ, the more they control. Thus, it's almost inevitable that employers tend to develop some kind of Big Brother complex (or, as I like to call it, the Chinese Towkay Syndrome). That is not a slight against their character; put that amount of power in anybody's hands, it's almost guaranteed to happen at some point. Employers are only human, after all.

However, regardless of their feelings towards how much control they have over your career, your career is yours and yours alone.

Your employer does have responsibilities. Managing your career is not one of them. Employers determine company direction. They manage the business. They drive profits. And if your career progression has a large bearing on the aforementioned, then sure, it is the employer's responsibility to ensure you succeed. Not because of you. Because it benefits the company, which the employer is responsible for.

However, in isolation, you don't matter. In the context of the entire company, your career is a drop in the proverbial ocean.

Your career is a
drop in the ocean.

Let's, for a moment, switch the context to that of the programmer, a role I'm most familiar with. A programmer has an influence on product quality. A programmer may be able to lead entire teams. A programmer may even be able to indirectly drive profitability. But the most control programmers have, is over what technologies they master, what skills they pick up, and what industry experiences they acquire.

Our careers are only thing we can have control over. How does it make any sense to cede that control to someone else? Someone that, I may add, has less skin in the game than you do. If you're not good enough, your employer suffers a temporary setback. But your employer can replace you just like that. You, on the other hand, are a hundred times more affected by your own professional success, or lack thereof. Depend on your employer to upgrade your skills and send you for training? What, are you insane or simply just spineless?

Learn what makes sense to you. Steer your career in directions that you want to go.

Final words

Relying on another person to "take care of you" is a sure recipe for calamity. Expecting someone else to care more than yourself about your own career, is nothing short of folly. Never ever make the mistake of thinking that your career is in someone else's hands.

Steady the course, Captain!
T___T