
Career Moats 101
Commonplace is about building career moats, and I’ve spent the last couple of months writing up notes on this topic. Career moats happen to be an obsession of mine; it is the primary lens with which I think about my career.
This is a summary of everything I’ve written about career moats so far. I intend to keep this post constantly updated, and linked from this blog’s main sidebar, in order to always be accessible to new readers.
First, what is a career moat? I’ve got a dedicated page for this, but in a nutshell:
A career moat is an individual’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over your competition (say, in the job market) in order to protect your long term prospects, your employability, and your ability to generate sufficient financial returns to support the life you want to live. Just like a medieval castle, the moat serves to protect those inside the fortress and their riches from outsiders.
The central thesis here is that career moats are worth pursuing because we live in a world of constant change. What is valuable today might not be valuable tomorrow, and the constant threat of automation and globalisation means we are no longer guaranteed careers (or company-supported retirement!) in the modern economy.
This is a depressing outlook — but it is, I think, the state of the world that we live in. It’s doubly depressing if you consider the full implications of this worldview: that not building a career moat means living in constant fear of dropping off the bandwagon.
In a sentence, then, a career moat is worth building because it buys you time when your job or career is threatened by an emerging industry change.
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Πηγή: commoncog.com