The career advice most people receive early in their professional lives tends to fall into one of two useless categories: either extremely broad (“find your passion,” “work hard and doors will open”) or extremely tactical (“get X certification,” “optimize your LinkedIn”). Neither is wrong exactly, but neither addresses the actual challenges of the early career most usefully. Here is a more grounded approach.

You Have More Time Than It Feels Like

One of the most reliable sources of early-career anxiety is the feeling that you are already behind — that your peers are ahead of you, that you should already know what you want, that the window for certain paths is closing. Almost all of that is wrong.

Early career is genuinely early. The choices you make in your twenties are much more reversible than they feel, the skills you build are more transferable than any single role suggests, and the people you think are ahead of you are almost always navigating equivalent amounts of confusion and uncertainty. Long career anxiety compresses timelines in ways that tend to produce worse decisions, not better ones.

Optimise for Learning, Not Only Status

Early in a career, the best career move is usually the one that teaches you the most — not the one with the most impressive title or the best-known company name. A role where you develop real skills quickly, see how a business actually works, and learn from people more experienced than you tends to produce better long-term outcomes than a prestigious but hollow position.

This does not mean ignoring brand or reputation. But treating learning as the primary filter — alongside fit with what you genuinely care about — tends to produce better choices than optimising for how things look from the outside.

Build Relationships That Have Nothing to Do With Your Immediate Job

The professional relationships that prove most valuable over a career are rarely the ones that were obviously strategic at the time. They are the colleagues from an early job who ended up in influential roles. The mentor who liked how you thought and stayed in touch. The person at a conference who connected you to an opportunity years later.

Building genuine professional relationships early — particularly with people more experienced than you — compounds in ways that are hard to trace directly but matter enormously over a career.

Pay Attention to What Actually Energises You

Early career is a valuable data collection period. You do not yet have enough information to make fully informed decisions about direction — but you can start building that information by paying deliberate attention.

Use Blomma’s reflection partner to notice, week by week, what kinds of work produce energy and what kinds produce depletion. What conversations do you look forward to? What kinds of problems do you find yourself thinking about voluntarily? What would you do more of if no one was evaluating you for it?

Those patterns are pointing at something real about the career that will suit you — and the earlier you notice them, the fewer lateral moves you will need to make later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I try to specialize or stay generalist early in my career?

A functional generalism that develops deep capability in one area while building breadth in adjacent areas tends to outperform pure generalism over the long run. The goal is to have something you are demonstrably strong at — while remaining curious and adaptable about the surrounding context.

How important is salary early in my career?

It matters, and accepting significantly below-market compensation because you are new is worth resisting. But optimising primarily for salary at the expense of learning, relationships, and environment tends to produce short-term gains that come at a long-term cost.

How do I figure out what I want to do?

Experience produces clarity faster than thinking does. Try things, reflect on how they feel, narrow based on evidence rather than theories. Blomma’s Goals feature is useful for structuring exploration in a deliberate way rather than waiting for clarity to arrive.

Is it OK to change jobs frequently early in my career?

Short tenures that reflect genuine development decisions are almost universally understood. What employers look for is whether each move made sense — whether you grew, contributed, and moved for clear reasons. Random-looking short tenures are more concerning than deliberate ones.

What is the one thing that matters most early in a career?

If forced to name one: learning velocity. The people who get significantly better faster — who actively seek feedback, build genuine skills, reflect on what they are doing, and adjust — tend to compound over a career in ways that outpace those who coast on early advantages.