Career Question

A former student wrote to tell me she had a chance to take a year long consulting job at a very big stable company, although it would mean leaving her current job that she had held as a headcount for a long time, and she asked my advice.  Here is an excerpt of my reply. 

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The question you are asking yourself is exactly the right one: do I leave something comfortable and reasonably secure for the possibility of an even better job, knowing that I am stepping into the unknown and could eventually lose more than I gain?

In rock climbing, going from handhold to handhold is one thing. But sometimes the next hold is far enough away that you actually have to jump to it, meaning you have to let go of the rock for a split second to get where you want to go, risking a serious fall. This is called a 'commitment move', and that is a good analogy of where you find yourself right now.

Sometimes we think in terms of 'secure' versus 'not', as though having a headcount job now means that job or the next one will be there as long as we want it. But that is often not true: the job that seems solid now can  disappear in a flash if the company goes into protect mode. No company, even the good ones, is so loyal to its employees that it will sacrifice its financial health to keep its employees secure. If there is a choice between the company or the employees, the company will survive. They can always get new employees; it is a buyer's market.  So the choice is not as black and white as secure versus the unknown. There is risk in staying, too. That might make it easier to think about.

In addition to your taste for risk, think about your long-term career goals. Where do you see yourself in 2 years, 5 years? What job would you like to be doing, and does your current position provide you with a path to that goal? Have you had that conversation with your manager? Does going to a large company as a consultant take you closer to that goal? Are you okay with being content, or do you want to check out the grass on the other side of the fence?

And a final thought: your current position is in a smaller organization. Where you are thinking of going is the very definition of a giant organization, and it is quite different to work in that culture. That is part of its security, but it can come at the cost of some autonomy in the job role: every decision gets processed through a long chain before it can be acted on, and that can be frustrating. You may not know how you feel about that until you've worked in it for a while, but it is something to think about nevertheless.

This is all more than you really asked - you happened to catch me in a moment of transparency. To sum up: For the most part, clinical consultants in the Bay Area do pretty well, and taking a full time contractor role at a bigger company is about as safe as it gets in the consulting world. Most people are betting that the job market in our industry will continue to improve slowly over the coming year - the number of deals announced this week alone seems to support that - and in the unlikely event that your contract is not renewed after the year, your resume would probably be richer for having spent the year there getting the big company experience.