Career advice

Everything below is written for the moment you are actually in — the week before an interview, the afternoon an offer lands, the Tuesday you realise you have outgrown the job. Pick the section that matches and skip the rest; nobody needs all of this at once.

Finding a job

A job search is a project with a scope, not a mood. Set the parameters first — field, level, salary floor, locations, notice period — and let them do the filtering, because deciding role by role is what turns a six-week search into a six-month one. Then work two channels at once: applications for volume, and people for the roles that never get advertised.

Applications reward tailoring over quantity. Ten applications with material written for the posting beat sixty with the same file attached, and the difference shows up in the reply rate within a fortnight. Track what you send, what stage it reached and what killed it — after twenty applications the pattern is usually obvious, and it is usually fixable.

If you are searching while employed, protect two fixed hours a week and treat them as unmovable. If you are searching while unemployed, cap it at four hours a day; past that the quality falls off and the anxiety doesn't. Browse by field rather than by title on the job search page before you decide what to look for.

Resumes and cover letters

A resume has one job: get you to a conversation. It is not an autobiography and it does not need to cover everything you have done. Two pages maximum, most recent role longest, and every bullet written as an outcome rather than a duty — what changed because you were there, with a number attached wherever a number honestly exists.

Match the language of the posting without lying about it. If they say "stakeholder management" and you did that under a different name, use their name for it. Cut the skills-bar graphics, the photo in most markets, and the objective statement; none of them survive contact with a recruiter reading forty files.

Cover letters matter less than people think and more than nothing. Three short paragraphs: why this role specifically, the one thing on your CV most relevant to it, and what you would want to do first. If you cannot write the first paragraph without generic filler, that is useful information about whether to apply. The resume builder handles the structure so you can spend the time on the content.

Interviewing

Interviews test three things in this order: can you do the job, will you be tolerable to work with, and will you actually take the offer. Preparation that ignores the second and third is half-finished.

Have six stories ready, each covering a real situation with a decision you made and a result you can describe — one about a failure, one about a conflict, one about ambiguity, one about scale, one about a change you drove, one about something you learned late. Nearly every behavioural question is one of those six wearing a different hat.

Prepare questions that are specific enough to be awkward to answer vaguely: what the last person in the role went on to do, what would make the first six months a failure, how the team's current priorities were decided. And rehearse out loud. The gap between knowing an answer and saying it well is larger than anyone expects and closes in about an hour of practice.

The offer and negotiating it

Almost every offer has room in it, and the cost of asking politely once is close to zero. The rule is simple: do not name a number first if you can avoid it, and when you do, name a researched range with a reason attached rather than a hope.

Negotiate the whole package, not just base. Signing bonus, notice-period cover, start date, holiday, remote days, review timing, title and budget for training are all movable, and several of them are easier to grant than salary because they come from a different pot. Get everything agreed in writing before you resign from anything.

Read the offer for the parts that bite later: probation length and terms, notice on both sides, non-compete clauses, bonus conditions and what "discretionary" means in practice, and any repayment clause attached to relocation or training. Ask what the last three people at this level were paid on entry — some employers will answer, and the refusal is itself informative.

Networking

Most people hear "networking" and picture asking strangers for favours. The version that works is duller and much easier: stay in loose contact with people you have already worked with, and be specific when you ask for something.

A good approach message names the person's work, says what you are trying to find out, and asks for twenty minutes rather than a job. Almost nobody can help you with "do you know of anything"; a lot of people can answer "how did your team decide between an in-house and an agency route". Follow up once, then let it go.

Referrals are worth roughly ten cold applications, so it is worth checking whether you know anyone at a company before applying rather than after. And return the favour on a schedule you can keep — the people who are useful to know are the ones who answer, not the ones with the biggest network.

Career paths and career stories

Careers look linear in retrospect and never are while they are happening. Reading how people actually got to a role — including the sideways moves, the year that went nowhere and the job they took for the money — is more useful than any ladder diagram, because it shows you which steps were load-bearing and which were noise.

Fields differ enormously in how legible the path is. Accounting, medicine and law have published ladders with defined credentials; product management, design and operations have none, and people arrive from everywhere. If you are choosing between fields, that legibility is itself worth weighing: a clear path is easier to plan and harder to leave.

The field guides on the job search page set out what the work involves and the usual routes in for twenty fields — including the ones people move into rather than start in.

Changing careers

A career change is a translation problem, not a starting-over problem. The mistake is presenting yourself as a beginner: most of what you have done transfers, but only if you describe it in the vocabulary of the field you are entering rather than the one you are leaving.

Do it in stages where you can. A sideways move inside your current employer into an adjacent function is the cheapest possible transition — you keep your salary, your reputation and your knowledge of the organisation, and you acquire the new title that makes the next move externally credible.

Where a full jump is needed, buy the smallest credential that opens the door rather than the largest one available, and produce evidence of doing the work before you have permission to do it. Expect a pay dip and decide in advance how long you can absorb it; the people who fail at this usually fail on runway rather than on ability.

Succeeding at work

The first ninety days set the terms for everything after. Learn how decisions actually get made — which is rarely the process on the wiki — find out what your manager is measured on, and deliver one visible, uncontroversial thing early. Do not propose reorganising anything in month one, however obviously broken it is.

After that, the currency is reliability. Being the person whose estimates hold and whose commitments land buys more freedom than being the cleverest person in the room, and it accrues quietly until suddenly you are the one being consulted.

Keep a running record of what you did, with dates and outcomes. Nobody remembers your year at review time, including you, and the document that closes that gap takes five minutes a week to maintain.

Getting ahead and getting promoted

Promotion is a decision made by people who are not in the room with you, using evidence you supplied months earlier. So the work is twofold: do the job at the next level for a while, and make sure the right people can see that you are.

Ask your manager directly what the gap is between where you are and the next level, and ask for it in writing or in a note you send afterwards summarising the conversation. Vague encouragement is the enemy; a specific list is something you can close out.

Sponsorship beats mentorship. A mentor gives advice, a sponsor argues for you in a meeting you are not attending. Sponsors are earned by making someone else's problem go away, not by asking.

Productivity

Almost all productivity advice is a system for deciding what not to do, dressed up as a system for doing more. Start there: if everything on your list is genuinely necessary, the problem is your workload, not your method, and no app fixes that.

What reliably works is protecting contiguous blocks of time for the work that requires thinking, batching the reactive work into fixed windows, and finishing things rather than starting them. Three finished tasks beat eleven at ninety per cent.

Meetings deserve particular scrutiny. A recurring meeting with no decision attached is a standing tax on everyone's attention; cancelling one is worth more than any amount of personal optimisation.

Remote and hybrid work

Remote work is not the office minus commuting. It changes how information travels, and the people who thrive are the ones who over-communicate deliberately: writing things down, making decisions visible in a channel rather than a call, and stating progress before being asked.

The real risk is proximity bias — being out of sight when opportunities are handed out. Counter it with visible written output and a standing conversation with your manager, not with performative online status.

Hybrid arrangements are the hardest to get right, because a meeting with four people in a room and two on a screen is a meeting with two second-class participants. If you are choosing between offers, ask specifically how hybrid days are decided and whether meetings default to everyone-on-video.

Money

Know your market rate before you need it. Salary data is patchy and self-reported, so triangulate: published ranges in job postings, industry surveys, recruiters who cover your field, and people who will tell you what they earn. The number matters at every offer, every review and every counter.

Understand what you are actually paid. Base, bonus conditions, equity vesting and cliff, pension contribution and the value of benefits are not interchangeable, and a headline figure built mostly on unvested equity is a promise rather than a salary.

Raises follow the same rules as offers: make the case with evidence, ask at the point in the budget cycle when the money is being allocated rather than after, and know what you will do if the answer is no.

Work relationships

Most workplace difficulty is a mismatch of expectations rather than malice. Before escalating anything, check whether the other person knows what you think they agreed to — a surprising proportion of conflicts end there.

Managing upwards is a real skill: tell your manager about problems early, bring the options rather than only the problem, and learn whether they want detail or headlines. Managing sideways is mostly about doing what you said you would do, on the day you said it.

Where a relationship is genuinely bad, document specifics with dates, raise it once through the proper channel, and decide in advance what you will do if nothing changes. Waiting for a difficult colleague to leave is a plan that usually takes longer than finding another job.

Diversity and inclusion at work

Inclusion is measured in outcomes, not statements: who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets the visible projects, and who leaves. When you are assessing an employer, ask for those numbers by level rather than in aggregate — an organisation can be half women overall and have none above middle management.

The practical questions worth asking in an interview are specific. What accommodations are made and who approves them. How parental leave works in practice for people who take the full entitlement. Whether pay is banded and reviewed for gaps. Whether employee networks have budget and executive sponsorship or only a channel.

None of this is about mission statements. Every organisation has one; the difference shows up in whether the answers to those questions are specific or vague.

Working parents and caring responsibilities

Leave entitlements, flexible hours, childcare costs and the return-to-work period shape a career more than most job choices do, and they are almost never discussed until they are urgent. They are legitimate questions at offer stage, and how an employer answers is informative regardless of the answer.

Ask what parental leave is actually taken, not what is offered — the gap between policy and practice is where the problem lives. Ask how flexible hours are agreed and whether they need renewing. Ask what happened to the last person who came back part time.

The return is harder than the leave. Expect to renegotiate scope rather than resume it, and put whatever you agree in writing, because the manager who agreed it may not be the manager you have in six months.

Videos, spotlights and career stories

Our video and spotlight material covers the same ground as the written guides, in the form people find easier to absorb: how a specific team actually works, what a day in a role looks like, and how somebody moved from one field to another. It is most useful early — when you are choosing what to aim at rather than how to apply.

Treat any company-produced spotlight as a recruitment document, ours included where an employer has sponsored it: useful for understanding what the work involves, not a substitute for the research you do independently.

Coaching and one-to-one support

Written guidance takes you a long way and then stops, usually at the point where the question is about your situation rather than the general case. That is what the coaches are for: a resume read by someone who hires in your field, a mock interview with real feedback, or an hour on whether the move you are considering makes sense.

Sessions are booked individually rather than as a package, and the coaching page lists what each one covers and what it costs.

Employer resources

If you hire rather than apply, the most useful thing on this site is the candidate's view of your own process. Publishing salary, cutting to three stages, briefing interviewers on what they are assessing and replying to everyone who reaches interview will each do more for your acceptance rate than any amount of employer branding.

The employers page sets out how we work with hiring teams, and — more importantly — what we won't do.