I, myself, am an entrepreneur, and would not function well working in a large organization. However, I like to keep in contact with a friend of mine that left graduate school the same time as me. He has run up the food chain in the corporate world. We’ve had an ongoing discussion about his career path. The firm he was working for was one of the fifty largest companies on the planet in terms of revenue, and regarded as a very prestigious firm in which to work. My friend’s work performance was nothing short of amazing, and he was receiving every promotion on time as he moved up in the company. He had a co-worker who was on his same career path until he did not make the next level promotion. Not pleased with the prospect of falling behind his career path timeline, he immediately left the firm and obtained another job. My friend stayed in his job where the next promotion was the giant carrot, a director level position, and the timeframe was five years away. The co-worker that previously left the firm landed a job as an assistantdirector, then made another job move to a third firm, this time as a director. My friend called me and was frustrated with himself for not leaving the firm at the same time as his co-worker. Now if he did not obtain the next promotion, he would have worked all that time and his career would have been out performed by his co-worker who left the company.
Unfortunately for my friend, after waiting all that time he found out he was getting passed over for director at the company because the firm was not growing fast enough.Additionally, more senior people were not leaving the company which made it harder to move up (we joked that these were the same senior people that noone wanted because they were not growing the company). Now my friend was behind the curve. The next time he talked to his past co-worker he was floored because he had moved yet again to a fourth firm and was now a Vice President. That is when my friend began interviewing and obtained a job as a director.
I asked him why he never left the company in the past and he said he had thought about it at length but going through the interview process sounded unappealing.
The reality was that during a five-year period an individual who was regarded by the same firm as a lower preforming individual had doubled my friend’s salary. If everything worked out perfectly, it would likely take my friend at least five years to make up the difference, if he ever could.
I think loyalty is a valuable asset. But when someone asks me what the value of having great interview skills is I always emphatically tell them double.
