A 20-Year Career Isn’t Linear — And That’s Not a Failure
Why the most valuable careers rarely follow a straight path.
Early in our careers, many of us are taught to equate success with momentum. Promotions, clean progressions, and visible upward movement become the markers we use to measure whether we are “doing it right.” But after two decades of working across roles, industries, and organizational structures, I have learned that longevity rarely follows a straight line.
It bends. It pauses. It recalibrates.
My career has taken me through many parts of organizations: coordinator, analyst, specialist, manager, and executive operator across higher education, government, finance, technology, and small business. At times, those shifts looked strategic. At others, they were responses to changing environments, evolving priorities, or circumstances beyond my control. What they consistently offered, however, was perspective.
Non-linear experience does not dilute your value. It deepens it.
Moving through different roles forces you to understand how decisions ripple across an organization. You see where processes break down, how priorities compete, and why execution matters as much as vision. Over time, you stop optimizing for titles and start optimizing for outcomes. That kind of judgment is not learned quickly—it is accumulated.
Yet reinvention is often misread as instability, particularly for women. Changes in direction can be framed as a lack of focus rather than thoughtful adaptation. But the ability to reassess, pivot, and reapply your strengths in new contexts is not a weakness. It is a form of professional intelligence that becomes increasingly valuable the longer a career lasts.
A long career also requires redefining success more than once.
What mattered to me early on—advancement, visibility, and pace—does not hold the same weight it once did. With time, alignment has become more important than acceleration. Impact matters more than optics. The work that sustains me now is work that allows me to contribute with clarity, steadiness, and purpose rather than constant urgency.
Longevity is not about staying the same. It is about knowing when to evolve.
If your career path does not resemble a straight climb, it may be because you have been building something more durable: discernment, adaptability, and the ability to operate effectively across complexity. Those qualities do not always show up neatly on a timeline, but they are precisely what allow a career to endure.
A twenty-year career is not meant to be linear. It is meant to be lived and shaped with intention.
