The Career Rubric Disappeared

Up through college, the path was mostly laid out.

Get good grades. Pick a major. Graduate. Get a job. Climb the ladder - Manager to director to VP. There were clear markers along the way—report cards, dean's lists, degrees, promotions, titles. You always knew where you stood because someone else was keeping score. That scoring system - the rubric - is gone.

It didn't disappear all at once. It eroded. Careers became less linear. Industries began shifting faster than degree programs could keep up. Most of the roles I’ve held since college didn’t exist when I was in college. Average tenure dropped. The idea that you'd spend decades at one employer went from normal to quaint to something people still want but can't quite find.

But when the old path went away, nobody replaced the rubric.

And without a rubric, people are left doing one of two things: borrowing someone else's, or operating without one entirely.

What I'm Watching Up Close

I have two daughters in their mid-twenties. Both  building careers in the performing arts—composing, directing, producing. They're not following a linear path because their field doesn't offer one. But the more I watch them, and their peers, and the early-career professionals I talk with across industries, the more I realize: this isn't a performing arts problem. 

This is the new default.

It looks a lot like what startups do.

A startup doesn't begin with a finished product. It begins with a hypothesis about who it serves, what problem it solves, and how it creates value. Then it tests that hypothesis, pays close attention to what works and what doesn't, and adjusts. Not everything at once. Specific things. The market teaches; the product evolves. 

The people building real momentum in their careers are doing the same thing. They're not following a path. They're running experiments.

The Ideal Work Profile

I've started calling this the Ideal Work Profile—the IWP.

I just made that up. But if you've spent any time in B2B, you know the ICP—the Ideal Customer Profile. Same idea, turned inward. Instead of defining who you serve best, you're defining what work fits you best.

The IWP isn't a job title. It's not a five-year plan. It's a working hypothesis about the kind of work that fits you, tested across roles, gigs, projects, and chapters.

You're not testing the role. You're testing the ingredients of the role.

Someone takes a job in events production and discovers they love the logistics and project management but not the client-facing piece. Someone else takes a content job and realizes what they actually care about is the research and synthesis, not the writing. A third person does freelance design work and figures out that what lights them up is translating a client's fuzzy idea into something concrete.

Each role is a prototype. What you're building is the pattern underneath.

Creativity. Engineering. Project management. Communication. Problem-solving. Pattern recognition. Translating ambiguity into clarity. 

Each role teaches you something about which of these ingredients energize you and which drain you. Over time, the pattern starts to emerge.

That's your IWP coming into focus. You never fully arrive. You change. The world changes. But the picture sharpens with each iteration.

The Swim Lane Tension

In Your Swim Lane Is a Signal, Not a Constraint, I wrote about the importance of being trusted for something specific. Being good at everything eventually turns into fuzziness, and fuzziness means people don't know what to call you for.

That's still true. But it creates a tension in portfolio careers. 

If you're composing, directing, producing, and teaching—what’s your swim lane? If you've done marketing, community, analyst relations, and advisory work—what's the one thing?

In a portfolio career, the swim lane isn’t the activity.
It’s the through-line beneath the activities.

My daughters' swim lane isn't "theater." It's closer to creating structured emotional experiences from scratch. That holds whether they’re composing, directing, or producing. The work changes. The wiring doesn’t. The work changes. The wiring doesn't.

When I look at my own career, the swim lane was never "analyst relations" or "community" or "marketing." It was connecting dots across functions, translating complexity into clarity, and building from ambiguity. That thread runs through every role I've had—even the ones that looked completely different from the outside.

The swim lane for a portfolio career is how you think, not what you do.

The Cohort Replaces the Ladder

A friend with decades of experience in the entertainment business gave my daughters this advice: don't chase gatekeepers. Find people like you and start making things together. If one of you breaks through, it often creates a path for the rest.

I've been calling this "finding your cohort."

Careers don't unfold the way they did forty years ago. But one thing hasn't changed: Nobody builds anything meaningful alone. 

The difference is structural. The ladder came with a built-in network: your boss, your boss's boss, the people one rung ahead.. Portfolio careers doesn't come with that scaffolding. You have to build it.

Your cohort isn't just people to collaborate with. They're the mirrors -  I wrote about in Afraid of Running Out, the people who reflect your strengths back to you. The ones who say, "you know what you're actually great at in this project? Not the thing you think."

Without those mirrors, it's easy to dismiss success as a fluke. You can't build a rubric from things you haven't figured out about yourself yet.

Your cohort is part of how you build the rubric the world stopped providing.

The Missing Feedback Loop

Startups have market signals—revenue, engagement, retention. Those signals tell you whether your hypothesis is working.

What's the equivalent for the IWP?

How do you know if your career hypothesis is working? I think there are signals. Real ones. And I think they can function as a rubric—not the kind someone hands you, but one you learn to read.

Next week, I’ll lay those out.

Berkson's Bits

When he was frustrated with us, my high school physics teacher used to say "you know, you can be replaced by an inexpensive pocket calculator." If he could see where technology is today, he would certainly double down on that.

What I'm Listening To...

I learned this week that Joni Mitchell recorded an album with jazz legend Charles Mingus. The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines popped up on my Youtube Music stream: Just more proof of how versatile Mitchell is as an artist. For jazz fans, this track includes other legends Jaco Pastorius on bass, Herbie Hancock on keyboard, Peter Erskine on drums, and Wayne Shorter on saxophone. 

The old rubric was external. Grades. Titles. Promotions. Someone else kept score.

The new rubric is internal. And building it is the work.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan