Before starting my career and finding my first full time job, I was lucky enough to stumble upon “The Startup of you” by Reid Hoffman. I only chose to Reid it because I liked the idea of LinkedIn plus Reid was part of the infamous Paypal mafia.

It turns out the book describes how the many aspects in world of work has already changed and most people have not noticed it. One idea in the book is ABZ planning which is I would describe as:

“Plan A is what you’re doing right now. Its your current implementation of your competitive advantage. Within plan A you make minor adjustments as you learn; you iterate regularly.”

The book goes on to extra the attitude toward plan A, for example by prioritising learning, making reversible small bets or maintain an identity separate from specific employers. The “BZ” part is

Plan B is what you pivot to when you need to change goal or change route. Plan z is the fallback position which is a certain, reliable stable plan if all your career plans go to hell. Its the certainty of plan Z that lets you take on the uncertainty and risk in your plan A and plan B”

The “cheat” that I’m going to share was inspired by this ABZ plan but has actually nothing to do with it. My mind works in its own ways and despite eventually doing the ABZ plan, a few months after reading the book, I remembered the ABZ plan as some “A-Z plan”.

I thought to myself, how do I find Z if I am at A? How do I start with the end in mind? Simple – Reid has invented LinkedIn and there is a trove of data out there.

At the time, I wanted to reach the highest level in User Experience which meant leading the design of complex systems in banking.

The steps to this “cheat” are:

1 – Go to LinkedIn and search the highest job title that you want in the industry you want.

2 – Take a look at each of these people to see: each role they took before, at what kind of company and what they did at each role. (Tip: try to also pay attention to the time between roles and the total time it took for each person to progress.)

3 – Repeat this for different people at different companies within that industry. If its unclear about each role, look at the profiles for people who are currently one level before the highest role and so on.

By the end of step 3, you should have a general idea of the “hierarchy of roles” that you have to progress through to reach your final destination “point Z”. For user experience design, it went something like intern, junior, mid-weight, senior, head of, vp, director and C level.

You should some idea of what each role entails as well but how do you find out exactly what you must learn in each role from the start all the way to “point Z”?

4 – Go to LinkedIn jobs and search the highest job title in your industry again.

5 – This time take a look at all of the job specifications/descriptions. Look through what tasks are in the role and what requirements are necessary to apply.

6 – Work backwards from the “top job description” all the way back to the lowest level while you analyse what skills are required to “level up” in each role.

Now you should have a clear idea of what each “level” in the “career path” is as well as what you have to do in each level to get to the next. By doing this research, you should be able to:

• Set goals for how long it should take you to reach the role you want
• Understand how long you should expect to take to progress (note down people who level up quicker and how they did it)
• Know what skills you have to pick up in your first role

I think doing this kind of research is vital for the fast paced world that we live in today. Previously, a graduate can go to work in a factory or large organisation where they would likely work for a long time. The role itself is likely to have been around for a long time and the levels are already widely known e.g. in accounting you train, you qualify, you become a manager, a director and then make partner.

In my case, “user experience design” was not a common job when I was in study (a small and limited amount of these jobs may have only existing in Silicon Valley). Even when I was studying Human Computer Interaction, practitioners in London only began to have “user experience” in their titles for no more than five years.

There was no “career guide” for user experience design which is why I had to find out what real people where doing and what real companies were trying to hire for. When new types jobs are being created every year and old jobs being “eaten” by software, doing this research will lead to interesting lessons about the nature of the workplace.

As an example, in “user experience design”, I found that most of the senior practitioners had started off doing website design on PCs whereas many more of the younger practitioners who had levelled up quickly were specialising in “mobile design”.

I hope this is useful to you and best wishes in your career.