But there is something attractive and enticing about doing things with intention and with care. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing your hard work, even if that hard work looks like small actions every day for a prolonged period of time, pay off.

First year me, alone in a huge city, no friends let alone leverage, had no idea how to build a career. She didn’t think about or consider what it meant to build a career intentionally and invest, in small ways, in her work, her assets, her capital.

Now, I have an unspoken set of rules I swear by to build a career that I love in a smart way, and in a way that aligns with my values, my wants, my needs and the person I want to become.

1. Knowing my wants vs. my needs

I am clear about exactly what I want versus what I need from my work specifically and my career more generally.

I wrote about this first one in last week’s article.

The idea comes from I Tried the “Non-Corporate Girlie” Life and Now I Want a 9-to-5 by This Is Not A Cover Letter on Substack. She suggests thinking about your career in terms of wants and needs. I’ve taken inspiration from her and created my own list of career wants and needs, but definitely check out her article.

My career wants:

• I want time outside of my job to learn a skill

• I want to be creative and have side projects(s)

• I want to meet new people and expand my network

My career needs:

• I need financial security in the form of monthly pay checks

• I need structure in my day (e.g. 9-5)

• I need to be learning in my job

Knowing what matters to you in your job and your career means you’re less likely to end up doing something you don’t like or something that stresses you out or doesn’t align with what you know you need.

2. I keep track of my assets and liabilities

At the end of each month I audit my career the same way I do my finances. I have a tracker, a simple Excel spreadsheet, that I use to do this. I update my wins document, any achievements and anything I’m proud of, whether that’s at work or even outside of work but still related to my career.

I like to think about my career in terms of assets and liabilities. My assets are my network, my reputation, my skills, my experience, my education. My liabilities are gaps in my skills that are holding me back from getting a certain job or role or progressing my career in a particular direction, they’re holes in my network, a qualification I don’t have that a role I want requires, and, maybe the biggest one, not having full clarity on what I’m actually aiming at, which makes every other asset harder to use well because I don’t know what to allocate it towards.

I also use this hour or so that I set aside to do this exercise to reflect. I pull out my journal and dump everything and anything about my goals, dreams, current or future jobs that I want, things I’m worried about or new ideas I have to progress my career.

3. I make myself visible, consistently

I’m always thinking about how I can make my work and myself more visible both online and in person. I think being invisible, especially early on in your career, is expensive because the truth is that opportunities go to whoever's already on someone’s mind, not the person they’ve never heard of.

Online, I like to post regularly on LinkedIn. A comment, a like, a post of my own, a repost, anything that increases the chances of my name popping up on someone’s feed.

I used Claude this morning to audit my LinkedIn profile and we worked together to find ways to boost my visibility without paying for anything. We added a short About and put some keywords into my headline.

When it comes to the in-person stuff, I try to get to events—industry ones, but also ones that have nothing to do with my industry at all. Which can feel daunting. But if a friend who works in something completely different has a chance for me to tag along, I’ll take it to meet new people, to learn, to make myself visible, even if it’s not necessarily to the people I “should be” visible to. You never know what kinds of opportunities might show up, if not now, then later down the line.

And at work, in my 9-5, I make myself heard. I speak up in every meeting I attend and I make sure to be clear about what work I did with my manager.

4. Always be learning something

Building your deck of skills early on is one of the most high-value things you could spend your time doing early on in your career.

I try to always be learning a new skill alongside my 9-5. Currently, that’s Italian for me. It could link directly to your day-to-day work but it doesn’t necessarily have to either. Mine doesn’t. I actually think it’s even more powerful if it doesn’t because you’re diversifying your skillset.

It could even be learning AI. That’s something I’m also doing. I’m speaking to people who understand and use Claude more and better than I do, I’m reading about it, and, most importantly, I’m playing around with it. This may not be for everyone, I get it, but I know that it will (and already is in many ways) become a part of my job and it’s something I want to have at least a strong baseline practical grasp of.

If you don’t have time because of work and other responsibilities, you could try to see where in your job you could practice a skill, whether that’s something completely new or something you just want to get better at. That could be volunteering to do more presentations, or finding small ways to practice communicating and articulating your ideas to people.

5. 15 minutes, every day

I’ve stopped waiting for the big moment and the big career breakthrough, which only really happens to a very small number of people (although it doesn’t really feel like that online).

I spend 10 to 15 minutes each day doing one small thing for my career, usually on the bus on my way to or from work, or at the end of my work day.

Sometimes that’s posting something on LinkedIn, replying to someone’s post about something industry-related that I found interesting, sometimes it’s scribbling something I achieved at work in my Notes app, sending a message to someone in my network who I haven’t contacted in a while or even just having a look at similar roles (or even dissimilar roles which I find interesting) online to see what’s out there (sometimes it sparks inspiration, other times it doesn’t!).

The point is to make a habit of being intentional about accelerating your career, even in these tiny little ways.

Building a career with patience and intention isn’t boring nor obsessive

For me, investing in my work and my career, focusing on the high-value actions early on, isn’t about making £1 million overnight. It’s not about obsessing over my career and feeding into hustle culture.

It’s about building something (or somethings) over time that I want to wake up for and work on every day, invest in and feel proud of at the end of it.

I don’t want to fall into a job and a certain kind of life that I don’t love accidentally. I also don’t want to sit around and spend my time on things that aren’t actually getting me closer to where I want to be.

These rules help me think about and invest in my career in a thoughtful way. They give me a means of clarifying what it is that I want and checking in with myself to make sure that I’m spending time and money on the right things, the things that yes will speed up the process of living the life I want, and also the things that actually make sense in the context of the kind of work I want to do.

The goal is not to optimise every aspect of my career, or make it my whole life, or even make a certain amount of money, or have a senior role by a certain age.

It’s to build my career in a smart, intentional way, and spend my time and money on the high-value things that will accelerate my career early on and bring me returns for a career that I love.

Thank you for reading Entry Point. We write for ambitious university students, post-grads and young professionals who want to shape their careers in smart and deliberate ways.

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All the way from “how to write the perfect cover letter” and “the best way to prepare for your next interview”, to “the new low-status high-income career you need to know about.”

I know…. I am one of those people dishing out similar kind of advice. After all that is what I created Entry Point for in the first place. And I think it’s great but I also think that there’s a lot of only one kind of advice and, as I’m about to get into, most of it is quite tactical.

Entry Point is also about making smart and intentional career decisions early on. It’s about entering and making your way through a tricky job market strategically, meaning aligned with the kind of work you want to do, how you want to spend your time and what matters to you—creativity, financial security, a hybrid work model–whatever it may be.

Building your career through cover letters and coffee chats might feel strategic, but it’s not.

SORRY.

It only creates a semblance of ‘making career moves’. The reality is that these small things, done on their own, without an underlying strategy to string them all together and make them coherent, doesn’t necessarily reflect what you want your career to look like in the long term and, what’s worse, limits your career thinking to what you can (and need) to do in that moment to get the next job or the next promotion, to who you are today, instead of who you want to be and become.

The most successful people don’t fight for the next job or pay rise to build their career. They use strategy to help them build a career with the job and the pay that they want.

Most career advice is just tactics not strategy

A couple of days ago I read Dan Koe’s essay on strategy, titled The Art Of Strategic Thinking (How To Become Wildly Successful), which is what prompted this piece.

I started wondering whether a lot of career advice suffers from the same problem he describes more generally: that we become very good at using tactics without having much of a strategy for what those tactics are actually supposed to achieve.

Should I apply for this job? Should I ask for a pay rise? Should I do this course? Should I go to this networking event? Should I learn this skill? Should I stay another year, or move now?

I’m not saying these are the wrong questions to be asking. On the contrary, they’re perfectly reasonable but they’re only one kind: tactical.

They should come after strategy.

And they should be driven by and based on strategy.

You don’t need a 5-year plan, you need a position

One of the main ideas in Dan Koe’s essay is that strategy is less about having a perfect plan and more about continually improving your position until better moves become available to you. He compares this idea to a game of chess to show that certain moves, by themselves, may seem boring or irrelevant (Player one), but that actually, in the end, all those moves made sense together in the pursuit of a particular outcome.

His point is that it is entirely possible to make lots of individually sensible decisions and still end up somewhere you never intended to go.

So to make sure that this doesn’t happen, it’s better to think about your career in terms of positioning. Like in a game of chess…

So what exactly is a career position?

A career position starts everything you currently have to work with: your skills, your reputation, your relationships, your track record, your work and the options those things open up for you.

But it’s not just everything that you have. It’s also about where you are relative to the market, the people around you and the choices you could make right now to steer your career in a particular direction. This means that position includes your capital (an idea from Cal Newport), but it also accounts for whether that capital is visible, well-timed and aligned to the right opportunity.

You can have a lot of capital and still be in a weak position. For instance, an excellent writer nobody’s heard of, sitting in an office with little to no visibility, could be capital-rich—have great creative writing skills and know a lot of other writers—and position-poor.

What this all means is that your current job is only one small part of your career position, and whether that is a favourable position or not depends on if it makes sense, in the context of all the other things you’re also doing, to get to where you want to be.

So, the next career move you make, your next decision, should make sense to you now and also who you want to become.

Being intentional early on

I understand that for those of us just starting off in our careers and trying to get our foot in the door, it’s not always possible to turn down an opportunity just because “it doesn’t align with my strategy”.

If you’ve been job hunting for 6 months and you finally get an offer, even though it might not have been part of your original strategy, you’ll probably take it. I probably would too.

And even beyond our early careers this is also applies. It would be naïve of me to suggest that we can all pick and choose what we want to do, and that we should pick what provides us with the most leverage in the long term, based on our career wants and needs, based on our goals, ambitions and dreams. That’s not reality.

But the point I’m making is less about being picky and choosy and more about thinking about the decisions you make in your career. It’s about being intentional, thoughtful, deliberate, not letting your career just take you wherever because you don’t know what you value or what kind of work makes you sparkle, or you simply fall into the trap of using all the tactics you find on TikTok and Instagram (and here too!).

What if you just don’t know?

It probably sounds like if you want to better position yourself and build your career strategically that you need to know the end goal. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true, for two reasons.

First, if you don’t know what it is you want to do in terms of job, in terms of work, then a good place to start may be to think about what you need versus what you want in your career. This idea comes from I Tried the “Non-Corporate Girlie” Life and Now I Want a 9-to-5 by This Is Not A Cover Letter on Substack. She suggests thinking about your career in terms of wants and needs. I’ve taken inspiration from her and create my own list of career wants and needs, but definitely check out her article.

Second, your position isn’t fixed. In fact, your wants and needs might look different in even just a year from now and almost certainly will as you go through different chapters of life, your goals change and values shift.

Why building assets is strategic early on in your career

This brings me on to my next point which is to focus on building assets, not just achievements.

I think we put far too much emphasis on what we’ve achieved and not enough emphasis on career assets.

The difference between the two is that an achievement is something that has been and gone, something you did which you’re probably proud of and which you can talk about in future, while an asset is something you can use again.

For example, a promotion at your company is an achievement, but knowing how to manage a difficult stakeholder is an asset. You can do that again. Similarly, being invited to speak at Ted Talk is an achievement, but being more comfortable public speaking is an asset. Finishing a big months' long project at work is an achievement, while developing a framework, body of knowledge or piece of work that demonstrates how you think is an asset.

Your network is an asset as is your reputation, your savings, your knowledge, your skills, your ability to write, all of these things that you have and can do.

Make a list.

Take out a piece of paper a write down a list of your career assets. Mine are:

• I have a strong relationship and an open line of communication with my liberal arts professor from university;

• I am proficient in Airtable (I know, kind of sad…) and can set up bases with Fields and Records on my own;

• I communicate really effectively through my writing and have a Substack and a portfolio of articles for external agencies to prove it;

• I’ve done public speaking at 2 big events which has only made my more comfortable being on stage and in front of large groups of people.

Tools I’m using to build my career *strategically*

All of this sounds nice in theory, but I’ve been trying to turn it into actual systems I can use when I’m making career decisions.

A career asset log. This is slightly different from keeping a list of achievements because instead of only writing down what I did, I try to record what I actually gained from doing it.

A work project might give me subject-matter knowledge, giving a presentation might make me more comfortable speaking publicly, working closely with someone senior might create a valuable relationship and writing an article might leave me with a piece of work I can send to someone six months later.

I log ALL of it.

An ‘opportunity filter’. Whenever I’m considering something new, whether that’s applying for a role, taking on a project, doing a course or starting a side project. The main question I ask is: what does this give me that I don’t already have?

A portfolio. My portfolio, which is literally a Google Drive folder, serves a similar purpose because it turns career capital that might otherwise be invisible into something other people can actually see. (I’ve written about this here)

A regular career review. At the end of each month I take a look at what has changed, what I’ve accomplished at work and outside of work.

What skills have I developed? Who have I met? What have I produced? What do people increasingly come to me for? What am I enjoying more, and what am I enjoying less? What opportunities are available to me now that weren’t available six months ago? Most importantly, am I actually moving in a direction I still want to go in?

Strategy applied on the micro level

You can also apply this tactics vs. strategy mentality on a micro level, to the tactics themselves.

Let me give you some examples.

Job applications: volume vs. targeting

Tactic: apply to as many roles as possible (currently how most job seekers operate). Strategy: a small, deliberately targeted list, tailored properly.

The data supports this.

Huntr’s Q1 2026 job search report, drawn from over 139,000 tracked applications, found interview rates falling as application volume climbs: roughly 9% for people sending 11–20 applications, dropping to under 3% for people sending 100+. More applications did not mean more interviews, it actually meant a worse rate on every one of them. A separate Monster survey found 48% of job seekers say they apply broadly rather than selectively (“spray and pray”).

My job strategy preference is always apply to less jobs but spend relatively more time and effort on each application.

Job-hopping: frequency vs. direction

Tactic: change jobs whenever a pay rise is on offer, treat job-hopping itself as the strategy. Strategy: use each move to deliberately upgrade employer quality or skill match, not just title or salary.

There’s a lot of mixed signals around job hopping, and even I’m not entirely sure what the sweet spot is. To be honest I’m torn between “I don’t want to job hop too frequently and then appear unreliable” versus “I want to job hop to try different things, see what kind of work I like, what I don’t like, learn new skills”.

From what I gather early on in your career if you’re staying in jobs for less than 2 years that’s when it starts to become a red flag for employers.

Workplace: saying yes to everything vs. choosing what compounds

Tactic: say yes to every extra task, note-taking, event-planning, onboarding new hires because being helpful and visible gets you ahead. Strategy: a deliberate read of which visibility work actually counts toward advancement, and which doesn’t.

Babcock, Peyser, Vesterlund and Weingart’s research with Harvard Business Review on “non-promotable tasks” speaks to this: work that’s genuinely useful to the organisation but invisible to performance reviews and promotion decisions. Their research found women take on measurably more of it, roughly 200 additional hours a year, time that isn’t available for the work that does count. Setting the gender angle aside, the point is that being busy and being helpful ≠ strategically positioned.

The formula

Onto the how-to bit. If you have no idea where to start in terms of thinking about your career strategically, here’s a good place. A simple formula, basic, from strategy 3 steps.

1. Where are you. Make a list of your career assets—your skills, network, your work.

2. Where do you want to be (and who do you want to become). What are your goals, dreams, ambitions? If it helps, create a career wants vs. needs list. Write out everything that you want to do, even if it has nothing to do with where you currently are.

3. How will you get there. Choose one or two small things that will help you get to where you want to be. Maybe that’s one hour at the end of each month to audit your career, maybe it’s 15 minutes each day. Maybe it’s getting a teacher to learn a new skill or creating a network tracker.

Thank you for reading Entry Point. We write for ambitious university students, post-grads and young professionals who want to shape their careers in smart and deliberate ways.

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Last December, I sent out a newsletter to 10 people in my network.

A month earlier I had come across a YouTube video called Fast-Track Your Early Career Growth (and mistakes to avoid) posted by the channel Level Up: Make No BS Career Breakthroughs.

In the video, Jason Yoong and Lorraine K. Lee talk about a very specific, high-ROI and low-effort way to nurture your network and accelerate your early career growth: a short email sent to your network—friends, colleagues, professors and mentors— once a year, updating them on your professional and personal life.

What this newsletter actually is

Think of it as a written, personal version of the portfolio I wrote about on Sunday, except instead of sitting on a website or in a Google Drive, it goes directly to the people who already know you and already like you: former professors, managers, internship supervisors, people you met at a conference or a coffee chat, even university friends who ended up in completely different industries.

This shouldn’t be conflated with a summary of your resumé nor a LinkedIn post announcing your achievements. It’s also not a personal highlight reel. It’s a short, personal email (which becomes a newsletter if you send it annually), maybe 300 to 500 words (MAX), sent to a list of people you choose, once a year.

Why it works

I did some digging to see if this is standard practice and whether I had just missed the memo (turns out I don’t think I have…), and I came across Jason Shen, a founder who has been sending quarterly personal updates to his own network for years.

“It’s a mix of what I’m doing at work; where my side projects have taken me; interesting books, movies, and articles I’ve enjoyed; and personal things like travel, events, deciding to move, feelings about an election, and sometimes even relationship or dating info.”

Jason Shen notes that people like receiving these updates which is probably right. Personally, I know I want to hear what others are up to, not just out of nosiness and genuine curiosity, but also, selfishly, because other people might be able to help me.

And unlike reaching out to someone only when you need a favour or a job, a yearly update keeps you “front of mind” for opportunities that come up with the future, without asking for anything in the moment. And that’s the key to making networking not feel so transactional: you consistently stay ‘visible’ to your network, so that when something does come up, you’re the person they think of.

Who to send your newsletter to

Lorraine K. Lee says that she adds mostly everyone from her network, including internship managers, people she met through career fairs and networking events.

For me, it felt easier to start with a smaller circle and more select group of people in my network. It felt like there was less friction between the cringe I felt just thinking about it and actually pressing send.

My rule is that I only include people who I genuinely want to be in touch with in the long term and also whose career I’m also actually interested in following.

What to include in your newsletter

1. What you did. One or two lines on the things you actually worked on or accomplished this year: a project, a job change, a skill you built, something you launched or shipped.

2. What you’re doing next. Where you’re headed, your goals, what you want to learn or work on in the coming year.

3. Your favourite articles, videos, commentary or industry events you attended. A select few pieces of media or even events you attended in the past year which you thought was interesting or helpful and want to share.

4. Offer support or help. One line offering help or support to the people receiving your newsletter.

What not to include in your newsletter

There are a few things I’d leave out.

First, your entire CV. This isn’t an annual report of everything you did over the past 12 months. You don’t need to mention every project, promotion, course, certification or event you attended. Pick three things that are actually interesting or meaningful.

Second, too much detail. Nobody needs three paragraphs explaining the project you worked on at your internship. This isn’t a job application. Just give people enough context to understand why it mattered and, ideally, enough to make them curious and ask you about it.

Third, corporate jargon. Avoid the “I’m thrilled to announce” or “I’m delighted to share”, this isn’t your LinkedIn feed.

Fourth (this should go without saying) a shopping list of asks. There’s nothing wrong with mentioning that you’re looking for a new role, hoping to meet people in a certain industry or would like recommendations for something, but asking for super specific things like an introduction, a referral, feedback on your CV—those are the things that will make people unsubscribe.

Last but not least, anything you’re including because it sounds impressive. The best updates give someone a better idea of what you’ve actually been up to, thinking about and becoming interested in, not just a highlight reel of your year

How to not sound like you’re bragging or job hunting

A few things help: write it the way you’d text a friend, not the way you’d write a cover letter. I recommend you keep the tone modest and let the update speak for itself instead of over-explaining how big a deal something was (without downplaying what you did either!).

And like I said, make it about them too, not just you: ask how their year went, or end with an open invitation to catch up or offer up support.

Why it feels cringe (and how to get over it)

You might be thinking, this sounds like a cool idea in theory, but it feels cringe, icky and gross.

I get it. I felt the same way.

It doesn’t feel natural to talk about your accomplishments especially when it’s not necessarily reciprocated, as in the person receiving your newsletter isn’t necessarily sending something similar to you. So it feels strangely self-important.

And yet, when we need something from someone in our network—a favour, a recommendation, a job—it doesn’t quite feel so cringe!

Yes, the first one you send might feel a little weird and outside your comfort zone. But to be honest I’d rather feel mildly cringe sending out one email in December than having to reach out to someone two years down the line with “Hi! Long time no speak…” followed by a favour.

A template to help you get started

Three things you can do today to prepare your 2026 newsletter

1. Open up your email and create a draft for your first annual newsletter by copying the template above.

2. Make a list of the people you want to add to your newsletter. If you’re at the start of your career it could be former professors, managers, mentors, people from internships or societies you haven’t spoken to in a while, university friends you might’ve lost touch with.

3. Open a blank doc and write three bullet points: what you did this year, what you’re doing next, and anything you’d like help with. This is a brain dump. You can (and should) come back to it when you properly craft the newsletter.

4. Start a “things worth sharing” note on your phone. Whenever you finish a project you’re proud of, read something brilliant, attend an interest event, learn something new or have a career update, add it to the note.

Thank you for reading this shorter issue of Entry Point. We write for ambitious university students, post-grads and young professionals who want to shape their careers in smart and deliberate ways.

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But the more I’ve thought about careers, and what actually helps someone stand out in a difficult job market, the more I’ve realised that almost every early career professional could benefit from having one, regardless of industry.

In a previous issue I shared how a few months into my post-grad job hunt, feeling increasingly desperate and discouraged, I decided to reach out to my university’s mentoring programme, which ended up genuinely helping me in spite of the bad rep these sorts of career services usually get. They matched me with an alumnus within a couple of days of signing up. He very helpfully suggested that I compile the articles I had been writing for different agencies and organisations into one place, like a website, which I could add to my LinkedIn profile and link to my CV. As I’m writing this, I’m realising how simple it sounds, and maybe it is, but I don’t think anyone had ever suggested to me that I do this before.

Whether you want to work in marketing, consulting, policy, finance, diplomacy, technology, research or communications, whatever, a portfolio gives a potential employer something your degree and CV can’t on their own: evidence of what you can actually do.

With that, in today’s issue of Entry Point, I’m covering:

• What a portfolio actually is, and why it’s not just a design thing

• Why it matters more now (in 2026) than it used to

• How to build one, tailored to your career goals and industry (step by step)

• Why you need one just for yourself

• Three things you can do today to get started, using tools you probably already have

What a portfolio actually is

The word portfolio comes from the Italian portafoglio, meaning a case for carrying loose papers.

I’m obviously not about to tell you to keep a physical folder full of your work (although I do keep a copy of my CV in my bag at all times and, yes, I did in fact give out a copy once during a coffee chat). I am, however, going to make a case for why you should keep a digital one.

How is it different from a CV?

I think there’s a misconception that a portfolio only makes sense if you have something visual to show off: a design, a photograph, a campaign. But a portfolio is really just proof of your thinking and your output, in whatever form that takes. It could be a research report you wrote or a model you built in Excel. It could be an article or a case study you worked on for a class. If you’ve created something and can explain how you approached it and what came out of it, that’s a portfolio entry.

The main difference is this:

Your CV tells employers what you have done. Your portfolio shows them.

You could, of course, just attach links to your work on your CV and your LinkedIn page. I do this and I think it’s a great way to add some proof points that recruiters and employers can access quickly and easily when they receive your CV or come across your online profile. The problem with this is that it’s not curated or tailored in any way and it’s not a single place, like a folder or a website, with everything there.

Why you need one in 2026

Like I said, a portfolio shows what output you can produce by applying certain skills, which is the evidence to back up what you say you can do on your CV or in an interview or even in conversation during a networking event, for example. Also, let’s be honest, visuals are appealing and looking through what someone has created is far more interesting than reading a cover letter or skimming a CV.

Another reason you need a portfolio, especially in 2026, is because it will help you stand out. As we’re all very much well aware of by now, the current job market is far from easy. In the US, competition for jobs is more intense as the number of jobs available to graduates is not keeping up with the supply of new graduates each year. In 2024, 40% of young adults between the ages of 25 and 29 had a higher education degree but only 30% of jobs required one. A similar situation is playing out in the UK: graduate roles have dropped by 33% compared to 2024, with 1.2 million graduates and only 17,000 roles.

When employers are choosing between candidates with near-identical CVs and near-identical degrees, a portfolio is one thing (among others, which we can talk about in a later issue) that helps you stand out from your peers (aka your competition) because most applicants won’t have one. If you want to be memorable compared to the hundreds of other post-grads, you need to provide something unique, something that is different.

The more fundamental reason a portfolio is so powerful is that you’re effectively creating trust with a potential employer. Instead of asking them to believe you’re capable based on a list of claims, you’re giving them evidence. That reduces uncertainty on their end, builds confidence and makes it much easier for them to picture you succeeding and doing well in the role.

You might argue that you can’t attach a portfolio to some applications, especially for big companies and structured grad schemes. And to that I say “true.” But a portfolio is something you can link on your CV, feature on your LinkedIn profile, send to someone after a networking event, include in an email to a recruiter.

The goal isn’t to optimise for application portals. It’s to optimise for opportunities, and opportunities come from far more places than application portals alone.

How to create your portfolio, step by step

1. Curate, pick and choose. Your portfolio doesn’t need to contain everything you’ve ever created. In fact, it probably shouldn’t, especially if you make it public, because that’ll just send mixed signals to people, like recruiters or potential employers, who view your page. Rather, it should be a carefully selected collection of work that supports the direction you want to take your career.

Start by looking at several internships or graduate roles that interest you. Identify the skills and outputs that appear repeatedly.

What are employers looking for in terms of output and skillset? It could be written communication, research and analysis, data visualisation, presentation skills, project management, commercial awareness, content creation, coding, strategic thinking.

Your portfolio should show in one way or another that you have applied these skills to produce something useful and valuable to them.

You do not need to know exactly what job you want. A general direction or industry or field—such as marketing, policy, technology or finance—is enough to begin.

2. Use work you have already completed. You may already have more portfolio material than you realise. The first place to look is through your university assignments, society work, volunteering, internships and personal projects. That could be essays or research papers, presentations, society marketing campaigns, event plans, newsletters, website designs, data analysis, coding projects, business proposals, policy briefs, videos, photography, reports or examples of fundraising and sponsorship work.

I think this goes without saying, but (just in case) DON’T just upload a 3,000-word university essay and expect an employer to read it. Create a short summary explaining the objective, your approach, the skills you used and the main conclusion.

3. Create projects to fill the gaps if you need to. Once you have reviewed your existing work, you might notice that you are missing evidence of an important skill (if you aren’t good on you!). It’s okay to create a project specifically to demonstrate that skill.

For example, if you’re interested in market you could create a made-up campaign for a brand, including the target audience, messaging, content examples and performance measures. Similarly, if you’re interested in policy or international affaris think about whether you could create a two-page briefing that explains an issue, assesses the implications and proposes possible responses.

4. Explain your PROCESS, not only the final result. A good portfolio does more than display finished work. It helps the person going through it understand how you reached the outcome. I think this is especially important in an era where AI can probably easily produce the thing that you’ve done on its own. So for each entry, either at the end of the piece of work or in a separate document altogether that you attach to your entry, include (a) the context, (b) the objective, (c) your role, (d) the process, including methods you used and why you used them instead of others, and (e) perhaps a reflection, too. In your “process” section, it might be helpful to explain why you made certain decisions, like why you constructed an argument in a certain way or why you used a particular piece of evidence as opposed to another to support one of your points.

5. Pick a format that aligns with your industry. If you’re not a creative, you probably don’t need to spend hours trying to perfect the visuals and style of your portfolio.

I created a SUPER basic Google Site with very minimal effort. This was before Claude, so definitely use AI, if you can and if you want, to help you create the format for your portfolio.

Some other examples of formats include: a simple website created through Notion, Wix, Squarespace or Carrd, a PDF, a Google Drive folder with clearly labelled projects or a GitHub profile.

Whatever you choose to go with, my number one piece of advice is that you choose a format that suits your industry and is easy to maintain. A student applying for software engineering roles may benefit from GitHub; someone pursuing writing or communications could use a personal website; a PDF might work well for consulting, research or strategy roles (but so would a website).

6. Focus on quality rather than quantity. You don’t need dozens of projects. Three to five strong examples can be enough for an early-career portfolio, as long as they’re relevant and tailored to the industry that you want to break into.

Each project should have a clear purpose and demonstrate something slightly different. One might show research, another communication and another leadership or problem-solving.

7. Keep updating it. Your portfolio should grow and change shape alongside your career. I like to set aside time at the end of each month to review my portfolio: add any new projects that I completed, remove ones that are outdated or not aligned with my career goals, record any results related to specific projects I completed that I might want to add to my portfolio in the future. If you’re a student, you could do this at the end of each term, after you’ve submitted your coursework and done your exams.

This is much easier than attempting to reconstruct several years of experience when you begin applying for graduate jobs. I’ve written about the importance of developing the habit here.

Why I have a portfolio just for myself

I like to keep a version of a portfolio just for myself. It’s a collection of ALL my work, which I’m continuously updating and refining, from over the years: all the articles I’ve published, essays I’ve written, group projects I’ve done, presentations, work from my 9-5, side projects, even notes and ideas.

Keeping all of my work in one folder on my laptop means that when I’m back on the job hunt, I can easily find and access evidence and proof of what I’ve accomplished. I don’t need to rack my brain trying to remember what I’ve done or where I’ve stored the things I’ve done. It’s sort of like a “brag document,” but instead of it just being a list of what I’ve done, it’s the products and outputs themselves.

Actionable steps you can take today

1. If you have a Google account, create a Google Drive folder called “Portfolio.” Add at least one piece of work to it.

2. Do some research to find out if other people in your industry are making portfolios and what they look like. Look into different formats and see if others in your field have anything similar to a portfolio, perhaps on their LinkedIn profile, for instance. This could help spark ideas for your own portfolio.

3. Pull out your Notes app or a piece of paper and brain dump all of the work that you have produced over the last year. It might be a super long list at first, but this is a great starting point from which to tailor and refine it.

Thank you for reading this week’s issue of Entry Point. We write for ambitious university students, post-grads and young professionals who want to shape their careers in smart and deliberate ways.

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If you’re about to graduate university and you’re nervous about finding a job, you’re not alone. I personally experienced my fair share of post-grad uncertainty and anxiety during my own job hunt a couple of years ago. Many of my friends are in similar boats, and even the ones who went to prestigious universities, graduated with a first class honours and have perfected the art of writing cover letters and CVs are struggling, too.

One look at the news and you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the UK, entry-level hiring is falling and competition is rising in the broader context of “sluggish economic growth”. Although the impact of AI on entry-level hiring is not yet sufficiently evidenced to draw any significant conclusions, the discourse is certainly not positive. Last year, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be wiped out by AI within five years, with unemployment potentially spiking to between 10 and 20% as a result. If the job market is changing in such fundamental ways, as the numbers suggest that it is, then so are the rules of the game. And many of us—if not most or even all of us—will have to adapt to this.

To an extent I was lucky: I ended up in the right industry at the right time, I met certain people who helped me massively in landing the job that I have now and AI didn’t threaten to make obsolete the work I wanted to do (at least not at the time). But I’m also hard-working, ambitious and I took advantage of university in a way that many students didn’t.

This is the playbook for smart, ambitious university students who want to lay the foundations to enter the job market before they get there.

THE PLAYBOOK

Student societies

Actively and regularly participating in one society is the thing that did it for me. It is also the thing that I had no idea how to get started with and the thing that probably terrified me the most because I didn’t know anyone there and its topical focus was daunting—a world I didn’t know a thing about.

At the beginning of first year, probably during fresher’s week, I was scrolling through the very long list of societies that my university offered. There was one that caught my eye and that’s the one I decided to join (at that point I still hadn’t realised that I needed to follow the society on Instagram and LinkedIn to keep up with their events. I also didn’t realise that I could join multiple…. but more on that later). I started attending the society’s events—mostly the industry ones, shying away from the socials. Twelve months in I applied to one of their Writer positions and published a few articles for the journal. And at the end of second year, I was elected by my peers to lead the society as President (why does that feel so cringey to say??).

I can’t overstate what this role gave me in terms of making my entry into the job market a much smoother and easier process than it might have otherwise been. Broadly, it gave me three things: a network that I could get advice, referrals and support from, a platform to practice soft skills that employers LOVE to see and something to talk about during my interviews that genuinely differentiated me from other candidates. As President, I had one-on-one conversations with industry professionals to invite them to and organise society events; I negotiated terms for sponsorships with big companies; I got up on stage and moderated panel discussions, which allowed me to practice my public speaking; other soft skills I put to use and was later able to talk about with future employers were leadership, team work and time management.

In the UK, universities and their departments can be quite siloed in the sense that students typically stick to their department and all the activities, events and societies related to it. But what is so cool about going to university is that there are so many opportunities to dabble in other areas that you might be interested in, even if it has nothing to do with what you’re studying! In all honesty, I wish that I had done more of this—attended more events hosted by the VC society and the entrepreneurship network, for example, to learn more about that world and connect with people building businesses and talking about personal finance.

Creating a network from scratch

When I first came to the UK for university I did not know a single person in the industry that I am now working in. Not one (I promise I am not exaggerating). Now, every time I go to an industry event I tend to see the same circle of people and I think to myself two things: one, what a small world and two, I did this.

Networking feels awkward and cringe and icky, I know. And yet the power in being able to make almost anything happen by just picking up the phone is genuinely unmatched.

I probably wouldn’t have the job I do now without having done the networking during university. I think there’s a misconception that you have to network with the most influential person in the room. The truth is that your best connections are your peers because they’re the ones who will eventually be important. At uni, societies and alumni or other similar kinds of student networks are great places to network in a way that doesn’t feel so ‘network-y’.

Internships and work experience

Both of the internships I did before graduation I effectively “created” myself. What I mean by this is that they weren’t formal internships in the sense that they had been set up by the organisation with a call for applications on their website. I found very quickly that applying to these generic ones wasn’t working because all of my peers plus all of the Master’s students were applying to the exact same ones. How was I to compete…?

So I took a different approach.

I cold messaged local businesses and startups in the industry I wanted to work in in my local area. I offered solutions to certain problems or gaps that I noticed, for example, that the startup was perhaps under resourced and could benefit from a research analyst to help them better understand the commercial opportunities in the market for their product. I think what especially helped my case was attaching a sample of work, evidence that I could actually do what I was saying I could.

Making the most of your professors

Most students only speak to their professors when they need something, whether that’s help with their essay before the upcoming deadline or want to be involved in a research project they’re advertising.

If there are professors or seminar leaders who have or had careers you admire or conduct research in areas you’re interested in, go to their office hours and talk to them about it.

Come at it from a place of genuine curiosity.

Not only might they connect you with people from the industry or give you advice and suggestions on how to enter the field or access certain opportunities, but they might spark new ideas about what other paths you could go down that you might not have otherwise considered.

Building visibility online

I felt incredibly cringey when I first started posting on LinkedIn about industry events I was going to and activities I was doing with societies.

Something that helped me overcome that cringe feeling was to write the post and save it to my drafts. Before writing it, I told myself that I wasn’t going to post it. I didn’t have to. All I had to do was write it and save it to my drafts. By the time it was written I was more likely to hit publish since I had already gone through all the effort to write it anyway.

LinkedIn isn’t the only place you can build your online presence. You could go to Substack or Medium if you want to write a more industry-focused newsletter. I created a super simple website on Google Sites, with minimal effort, and posted any articles I published with external organisations on there, as well as ones that I wrote just for the site.

The point is not just that you can be found online—by recruiters and companies—but that there is concrete evidence of work you have done. And depending on who you are, what you want to do, where you want to work, this will look different. It could be collection of your graphic designs or artwork if you want to work in the creative industry, or it could be a portfolio of excel spreadsheets that shows your analysis of certain businesses or opportunities in the industry.

Competitions, hackathons, workshops

A lot of universities host interactive events and activities like competitions, hackathons, workshops, festivals, debates, conferences. You name it.

These are a great way to be more visible, meet people that want to do similar things to you, work in similar industries. It’s also a great show of work you’ve done and contributed to, something that you can speak about in an interview.

My university department even offered an opportunity, on a cyclical basis, to produce a long-form article for an external organisation. Although it wasn’t paid, it helped me build that online visibility that one bit more and my supervisor was able to give me a recommendation at the end of it.

Create something for the university

Universities are institutions where fresh ideas and diverse perspectives should be shared. Your seminars should spark debate and your lectures should provide a unique point of view based on a particular area of research and knowledge.

So why not contribute ideas and POVs in more concrete ways? Think incubator for startups in your area of interest and department; think a panel with three speakers from different organisations within the same industry to make for an interesting listen; think publication for students to write about and share their insights on topics. There’s a million different ways you can contribute to your university, to your department, your course. And you have all the resources you need - department leads, professors, seminar leaders (or TAs if you’re in the US) and perhaps most importantly your peers, many of whom are probably in a similar part of life as you.

Even if the thing that you do, the thing you choose to invest time in and set up, isn’t a success you have virtually nothing to lose (other than time which yes arguably is actually very valuable but that’s one for another day) and you have everything to gain: evidence of a project you can put on your CV and talk about with a potential employer in an interview, evidence that you’re proactive, connections with new people perhaps who you worked with.

Modules and grades

I’m not going to tell you that your grades don’t matter. They do, to the extent that the return on chasing them further drops off fast. Sort of like the evidenced relationship between money and happiness. Most employers and a lot of grad schemes are not so much interested in your grades as they are the university you went to and the things that you did beyond the coursework.

This obviously isn’t me telling you to ignore your degree. All I’m saying is to stop treating it as the ONLY thing that matters.

Plus, in the UK if you’re doing a social sciences degree like I did but have plans to go into private, or even the public, sector, trying to perfect the art of writing an academic essay isn’t really worthwhile because you probably won’t be doing that. That being said, the ability to communicate effectively in writing is important (though perhaps that is changing with AI…). Similarly, and probably more importantly, learn how to present well. I did quite a few presentations during univeristy as part of my coursework and it’s great practice for the real world. The stakes are lower, and you can get feedback from your professors and your peers. I say “more importantly” because I think being able to communicate the information and workings out that you get from AI is so crucial when AI an effectively do the work now.

The compounding effect

I’ve previously written about the idea that career capital, a term coined by Cal Newport, is created by the accumulation of small decisions you make and actions you take over time that ultimately compound into something much greater.

The same rule of thumb applies here. Each thing you do at university makes the next thing easier, and the one after that easier still, until you’re not starting from zero every time, you’re compounding.

This is also why starting early matters more than starting big. If you join one society in first year and stay with it you’ll probably havea network, a track record and a story by the time graduation rolls around. On the flip side, if you wait until final year to “get serious” you’re effectively trying to build all of that at once, under a deadline, with no time for any of it to compound. Same effort, wildly different outcome, purely down to when the snowball started rolling.

So don’t ask which of these ten things is the one that matters the most. Ask which one you can start this week, badly and awkwardly (who cares!), so that it has time to turn into the next thing.

A personal close

It would be naïve of me to tell you that if you do all of these things you’ll transition into the job market with no qualms.

You’ll probably still come across some bumps along the way, but at least you’ll have graduated with certain foundations that will increase your chances of success in whatever it is that you want to do and accomplish in your career.

At the same time I do believe that perseverance, hard work and grit are the fundamentals to all the things I’ve just written about and without these things you probably won’t get very far in the first place. Luck plays a part, too, and so does timing. Privilege is real, and sometimes other responsibilities come first.

That being said, the reason we write this newsletter is to help you maximise your ability to create opportunities and entry points into whatever market it is that you want to work in.

Thank you for reading Entry Point. We write for ambitious university students, post-grads and young professionals who want to lay the foundations for their career in smart ways. Follow along for more content like this.

I’ve always been an ambitious person. I’ve always cared cared about doing well at school and at work. At the risk of sounding cliché, I have dreams, goals, ambitions, around the value I want to add and the ways I want to contribute to the world.

And yet since I started my 9-5 I haven’t been as intentional about my career as I perhaps was previously, which I know is partly because I’ve fallen into the “I’m too busy juggling a new job with what feels like a hundred other responsibilities on the side” narrative.

The problem with this is that I will end up on a certain career path, regardless of whether it is intentional or not. And in 5 to 10 years’ time I’d rather be living a life that I deliberately created than one that I fell into by accident.

So a few months ago I decided to stop treating my career like something that just happens to me and start treating it like an asset that I’m actively managing.

In this issue of Entry Point, I’m breaking down:

• Why your career deserves the same regular check-in as your bank account

• My 4-step monthly career capital routine

• The 6-month audit

• The coffee shop date

• A few action points for the month

Let’s get into it.

Why you should treat your career capital like your financial capital

Recently, I’ve started thinking about my career the same way I think about my personal finances.

Many people set aside time on payday or at the end of the month to budget their expenses, review their bank account, automate their investments and check in with their money goals. Personal finance content creators have mainstreamed payday routines and weekly money habits.

Yet very few people (including myself since only just a few months ago!) set aside dedicated time, let alone create systems, processes, and habits, for the very thing that earns them that money in the first place: work.

And while career capital generally isn’t treated or given the same attention that financial capital is, the idea is the same—that over time, the accumulation of assets, big and small, compound into something much greater.

Now, to be clear I don’t claim to an expert in personal finance by any means(!), but there are two fundamental principals from finance which should hopefully convince you to build a routine to check in with your career capital like you do your money.

The first principle is compounding. Financial capital compounds through habits done consistently over time: allocating a portion of your income to your investment account each month, reinvesting the return, not touching the account when the market dips.

Career capital works the same way. You learn skills, meet new people, complete projects, all of these things that compound over time (I’ve written about this here!). Which means that you need to give deliberate attention, even if just in small ways, regularly, to your career.

The second is rebalancing. Even a well-built financial portfolio will naturally drift from its target allocation over time, as some investments grow faster than others, so investors check in periodically, quarterly, annually, at major life changes, to sell off what’s overgrown and top up what’s lagging, adjusting for whatever their goals and risk tolerance look like now rather than what they looked like five years ago.

Career capital needs the same maintenance. The skills, relationships, and priorities that made sense when you started your first job aren’t necessarily the ones that’ll get you where you want to go next, which is why a regular check-in matters just as much for your career as it does for your bank account.

It’s time your career got the same treatment your bank account does.

My 4-step monthly career capital routine

Once a month, usually around payday (I do my finances and my career review around the same time), I block out 90 minutes. Before I sit down at my desk and open my laptop, I make myself a cup of coffee and put my phone on DND (do not disturb). Some months I’ll also pull out my journal if I want to be more reflective in terms of thinking about what I want my goals and ambitions.

Some months are more intensive than others, and I won’t have 90 minutes to give to this. On those months, I do a stripped-down twenty-minute version, balance sheet only, rather than skipping it altogether. In months when I do have some more time, I like to be more reflective and go through the process (below) in slower time and in more detail.

Here’s exactly what I do, step by step.

Step 1: The balance sheet

I keep a simple tracker (mine’s a Google Sheet, though Notion works just as well) with two columns, one for assets and one for liabilities.

In the assets column: new skills I’ve learned in the month, projects I’ve completed, anything I’ve published or presented, feedback or endorsements I’ve received, any credibility marker I can point to as proof of what I can do. In the liabilities column: skill gaps I know are holding me back, relationships I’ve let go and anything I said I’d work on last month that I didn’t touch.

The point isn’t to make yourself feel bad about the liabilities column. It’s the same reason you’d check your bank balance even when you know spending has been high—you can’t manage what you’re not looking at. It’s the same way avoiding looking at your bank account to see where your money is actually going is not helpful.

Step 2: The documents

Update your CV, LinkedIn, portfolio, and what I think is the most underrated document in anyone’s career toolkit: a brag document. The idea, popularised by software engineer Julia Evans, is to keep a running, dated list of things you’ve done well, wins, contributions, moments someone said something useful about your work, written down as they happen rather than reconstructed under pressure six months later when you need them for an appraisal or an interview.

Updating these documents monthly means they’re never more than a few weeks out of date, which matters more than it sounds like it should when an opportunity shows up with no warning.

Step 3: The network audit

I go back through the month and note who I actually spoke to, properly spoke to, not just liked a a LinkedIn post from or spoke to for purely work purposes. I add any new contacts to my tracker, flag two or three people I want to follow up with, and I note any relationships which have gone cold.

Step 4: Next month’s investments

Coming out of the review, I pick three things for the month ahead: one skill to build, one relationship to nurture, one credibility project to move forward, whether that’s a course, a piece of writing, a small side project, anything that leaves you with more proof than you started with. Three feels like the right number. Any more and nothing gets the attention it needs.

The 6-month audit

The monthly review is tactical. The 6-month check-in is strategic, and it needs a different kind of attention I think.

Every six months, I pull up my balance sheet from six months ago and put it next to the one I have now. Has it actually grown, or have I just been busy? I go back to whatever goals I set at the start of the period and ask honestly whether they still make sense, or whether what I want has shifted since I wrote them down.

And I look at the bigger picture: is my current role, or my current direction, still generating capital at a pace that matches how competitive things actually are out there right now, or is it time to change something, a role, a focus area, the kind of work I’m saying yes to.

Think of it like this. The monthly review keeps the system running. The 6-month one is where you check the system is still pointed somewhere worth going.

The coffee shop date

Sometimes I like to do a career review with a friend. I’m a fan of having an outside perspective, as long as there aren’t too many and it can be a fun way to go about this.

One idea is to pick a friend who’s also serious about their career, set a date at your favourite coffee shop, and audit each other’s progress and goals.

Trade balance sheets, ask each other the harder questions you’d avoid asking yourself, exchange ideas about career ambitions, what you’re most proud of over the last 6 months, where you failed and the lesson(s) you learned from it. It works well because they might notice the blind spots you’ve gotten too close to see and force you to take a step back.

Action points

• Block two hours in your calendar this week (and treat it like a meeting you can’t move!)

• Start a career balance sheet, a blank spreadsheet with two columns, ‘Assets’ and ‘Liabilities’ is enough to begin

• Update one thing on your CV or LinkedIn based on what you’ve actually done in the last month

• Message one friend who you might want to do your 6-month review with

If you already have some version of a career check-in, I’d love to know what it looks like, hit reply and tell me. And if you don’t, what’s actually stopping you from starting one this month?

That’s all for today’s issue!

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Most of the things on that list aren’t glamorous. None of them are a single big “break”. They’re small, unglamorous, and repeatable things that, if done consistently over time, compound and create disproportionate effects over the long-term.

This is that list, cleaned up and made useful for you.

In today’s issue:

• Why ROI is so important in accelerating your career growth

• 9 high ROI career moves I’m focusing on to accelerate my career growth

• The return on managing your energy instead of your time

• A couple of action points

Photo credits: Pinterest

Why ROI is so important in accelerating your career growth

Career capital - the accumulation of your network, skills, projects, options and reputation - is created through compounding the same way that financial capital is: through small, repeated, and sometimes not-so-glamorous inputs that, over time, result in something much greater.

I’ve previously written about compounding and the effect which it has on your career. But I haven’t expanded much on which things have the highest return on investment or in others words result in significantly more money or value than you originally put in.

In terms of a career, these are the little, low-effort or low-cost things that you do which have a disproportionate impact on your career.

And when time, energy and money are finite, especially in a job market that is changing and causing uncertainty among a lot of young people, you have to be deliberate and invest in activities that will earn you more than they cost you.

9 high ROI career moves

Here are the high ROI career moves that I am putting my money, time and energy into.

1. Build trust in your 9-5 in the first 90 days. When I started my first job in industry about 18 months ago I had zero leverage or capital, social or other. I had a very limited network in the industry compared to my colleagues and basically no experience other than a 6-week internship. That meant that I had to invest my time and energy into building trust within the company.

Fast forward to now, I know that my colleagues feel that they can rely on me because they invite me to meetings that are perhaps beyond my job description and come to me with certain tasks.

When you start a new job, the first 90 days are crucial. Regardless of whether you are the youngest one in the company or the least experienced you have to build trust with your colleagues. The way to do this is to to focus on your deliverables and make sure that you do everything that is asked of you, including the more boring and tedious tasks, at a high standard and on time.

Being a reliable teammate, and meeting your deliverables on time and at a high standard helps build your reputation and gain that trust that you need. In the first few weeks of a new job, your managers and your colleagues are still figuring out the your ability to communicate clearly, solve problems on your own and deal with ambiguity and complex situations, so being able to demonstrate that you can deliver results reliably is critical.

2. Send a yearly newsletter to your network. I did this for the first time in December 2025. I collected all the people in my network - colleagues, professors, people I met at events and added them to the email list. In the newsletter I wrote down 3 bullet points: what I’d been working on the past you’re, what I was proud of, what I’m looking for in the new year. I also attached proof of some of my work - articles, projects, LinkedIn posts - evidence of what I had achieved.

A personal update, sent once a year to the people in your professional orbit is a great way to nurture your network. Most people only reach out to their network when they need something, which is exactly the wrong time to reintroduce yourself. So think of this as a strategic touchpoint.

Plus, senior execs like to hear from younger people, especially if they were involved in your professional life at some point. End your newsletter with something that can help the person/people you’re sending it to: it could a list of industry articles you’ve read that they may find interesting or events coming up that would be relevant to them. Or you could simply offer up help and say something like “if there’s anything I can do for you let me know”.

3. Keep a list of every industry professional that you meet. This one is so low effort that there is almost no excuse not to do it. A couple months ago I created a Note on my phone to keep track of professionals that I meet, through work and events, throughout my career. I note their name, their occupation, how I met them and where they are best. You could even do this more formally and have a spreadsheet with more details. Notion would work too.

Not only does it mean that you won’t forget who’s in your network but if you’re in a particular city, either just visiting or for work, you can refer back to your list to see if there’s anyone in that city with whom you could grab a coffee while you’re there.

4. Post on LinkedIn once a week. Once a week I post on LinkedIn. Each post usually looks like one of three things: an opinion or point of view on something that has happened in the industry, an event I recently went to or a finding from a piece of work that I recently completed.

If I’m feeling lazy that week or simply don’t have a lot of time I will repost one of my company’s posts with a few thoughts, or just leave a comment on someone else’s post - usually someone from industry and from my network.

5. Invest in your professional development. Bigger companies like consulting firms and investment banks tend to be good at professional development. They might have schemes to train graduates and teach them certain skills.

That wasn’t the case for me. I joined a startup after graduating university and they simply did not have the resources (time, money or energy) to invest in my professional development, which is completely fine of course but it did mean that I had to be more proactive and take ownership of it.

What this looked like was proactively setting quarterly 1:1’s with my boss, including preparing an agenda for them. On top of that I scheduled 6-month reviews which would be the times that I’d bring up pay. I found that these short feedback loops greatly accelerated the speed of my learning and growth. More importantly, it showed my managers that I was proactive and interested in working on myself, both professionally and personally.

6. Be the CEO of your own career have a bias to action. There’s a specific kind of person who’s full of ideas, opinions, and observations about how things could be better - and never does anything about any of them. Don’t be that person. If you notice a gap, a broken process, a better way to do something, bring it up to the right person and at the right time and go and do something about it. You have control over the outcomes of your career if you’re intentional and lean in it will pay off.

Being “high agency” is about taking ownership and being proactive. If your manager hasn’t scheduled your next 1:1, schedule it yourself. And don’t wait for them to create the agenda. They may not have time and anyway a 1:1 is your chance to steer the conversation. Being high agency isn’t about being perfect and having all the right answers. It’s making a decision even when there is uncertainty and imperfect information, taking the next step even if you might have to pivot three steps in, taking ownership of a task even if ‘it isn’t your job’.

Other small ways to do this which have disproportionate rewards are to speak up in every meeting, including the all-hands, offer support to your colleagues when you notice that they may have a lot going on one week and you feel you have capacity to step up, and set aside some time every month to go through your career capital as you would your budget.

7. Keep a success tracker. I have a Google Doc to keep track of my wins as they happen. It includes metrics I’ve moved in the company, projects I’ve completed at a high standards, testimonials people have given me unprompted. Some people call this a “brag” document. Whatever you call it, the point is the same: write down that thing you accomplished and did the week it happens, not the week before your performance review or when you start looking for a new job.

8. Get comfortable with cold outreach. Every Wednesday morning, I open my laptop and spend 15-20 minutes sending a cold message to one person. It might be someone in my industry, a mentor, an alumni from my university, anyone whom I think it would be worth having a conversation with either to learn more about their career path or get advice from them.

Cold outreach works, but only when it’s specific and you’re also adding value for them. A generic “would love to pick your brain” message usually gets ignored, and to be honest I think that it should because you’re asking the other person to do all the work of figuring out why they should care. So give them something to work with: explain why you’re reaching out to them specifically, what you noticed about their path, and what you’re actually asking for. Bonus points if you can offer a solution to a problem they may have in their business or offer support in another form.

9. Invest in skills. Information and technical skills are less advantageous today than perhaps they once work. Information is easily accessible which makes knowledge less valuable. AI has made the ability to adapt more relevant than the ability to master one single tool. Having a variety of skills might just be your advantage.

So figure out what skills will be valuable and what skills won’t be in the next few years in your industry and for the types of roles you think you might want (admittedly this isn’t an easy thing to do so to your best of your ability) and put your money, time and energy into those things. If having a second language under your belt will allow you to work in another country, then spend money on lessons and set aside an hour a week to practice. If you think that AI will help you do parts of your job better and quicker then spend time understanding and applying AI.

A few examples of skills that I’m personally investing in are public speaking, language learning and applying AI.

Manage your energy, not your time

A couple of years ago I read an incredible book written by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz about the power in managing your energy. In The Power of Full Engagement Loehr and Schwartz argue that energy, not time, is the resource that actually determines performance, and that it diminishes with both overuse and underuse. Real performance comes from balancing how much you spend against how deliberately you renew it: physically, emotionally, mentally, and in terms of a sense of purpose beyond just yourself.

This matters early in a career because it's easy to burn out trying to do everything at once - a 9–5, a side hustle, a social life, the gym, marathon training, family, your career, all simultaneously. None of that has a high ROI. Long before you get anywhere with any of it, you crash, and you're left needing to rest instead of being able to keep going.

I find it more useful to think in seasons. If you’ve just started a new job, that season is for learning the company, the role, and the basics, and for building trust - not for also trying to overhaul your network at the same time. Once you’re through the steepest part of the learning curve, that’s when it might make sense to shift energy toward expanding your network. I didn’t start this Substack until I felt genuinely settled in my 9–5 - until I actually had the energy and mental capacity to give it properly, rather than squeezing it into whatever was left over.

And on a micro level, the same logic applies week to week. Some weeks you'll have more capacity - that might be the week you rest, or the week you finally start that course you’ve been meaning to. I have to remind myself of this constantly, because I'm as guilty as anyone of trying to do all of it, all the time.

I have to remind myself of this because I’m certainly guilty of trying to do everything all at once.

“To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest.”

The Power of Full Engagement

Action points

• Pick one of the eight moves above that you’re not currently doing, and start this week.

• Start your success tracker today, even if it’s a blank doc with one bullet point in it. You’ll thank yourself in six months.

• Before you add anything new to your plate, ask whether you actually have the bandwidth for it right now, or whether it’s a better fit for a different season.

That’s all for this week, happy Sunday!

My solution?

To build something outside of my 9-5, something that will mean that my income, my skills, my network and my options are diversified, so that if my ‘fears’ do come true, and I am replaced by an AI, that I have something to fall back on. Beyond just a security net, this ‘thing’ that I work on should - by the very nature of me putting time and energy into it - grow my career capital in a way that makes sense for the AI era.

In this issue I’m breaking down:

• How AI is actually changing the entry-level job market

• Why AI literacy matters

• 3 ways to build a career in the age of AI, for the age of AI

• What I’m doing outside my 9-5 to achieve these things

How AI is actually changing entry-level jobs

Entering the job market post-grad and trying to secure an entry-level position is becoming increasingly difficult. In a world where AI is becoming very good at doing the work typically given to junior employees, what does an entry-level position look like?

Last year, the CEO of Anthropic said that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next 5 years and LinkedIn exec Aneesh Raman warned that AI is replacing the jobs of early-career professionals. Research at the World Economic Forum suggests that 50-60% of typical entry-level tasks can already be done by AI: drafting reports, conducting research and follow-on analysis, coding, data entry, proofreading .

So if you’re a student or a young professional, in the early stages of your career, you have to start thinking and building your career more strategically and creatively.

Let me explain what I mean by that and tell you about the things I’m doing to prepare myself for work in the AI era.

On AI literacy

Before I outline some of the perhaps more fun and interesting points, a quick note on AI literacy. Knowing where AI can replace your work, help you do it better and where it still falls short will help you pinpoint where to start with regard to learning AI (it might also make you feel a sense of relief when you realise that not all is doom and gloom!).

Proficiency with AI tools is becoming - and in some cases already is - an expectation of many employers now. According to research by Thomson Reuters’, “AI will not replace professionals, but AI-powered professionals will.” This means that junior employees are now expected to be at the very least comfortable using AI, if not requiring a certain level of AI skill, even for roles outside of tech.

The second thing I’m on a mission to understand is how entry-level roles are going to change. A lot of evidence suggests that junior hires might have more responsibility and take on work that looks more managerial or strategic. According to Forbes, instead of doing repetitive tasks that AI can now do, new hires “could take on high-level, more strategic work that would usually be handled by their seniors.” In this case knowing the right questions to ask and learning about prompt engineering is critical.

The other day, I pulled out the job description written into my contract for work. After adding the bits that I do which weren’t in the original job description I took pen to paper and, line by line, I went through the job responsibilities and wrote down where AI could do the job and where I could use AI to help me do the job better. Specifically, I noted these specific things:

1. Tasks AI could do almost entirely on its own

2. Tasks AI could help me do faster

3. Tasks where AI could improve the quality of my work

4. Tasks where I still need to be the person making the decision

5. Tasks where using AI would slow me down

You could even do this using AI. Open your AI of choice - Claude or ChatGPT , for example - attach your job description and ask the AI to tell you where AI could help you do your job, where it could help you do your job better, and where a human-in-the-loop would be beneficial and/or still required.

I’m also spending some time outside my 9-5 to become proficient in AI. I’ve recently learned different frameworks on YouTube to help me write better prompts and have been trying to understand the impact of AI on my potential future career by following creators like Hannah Zhang who talks about the nonlinear career.

3 ways to build a career in the age of AI, for the age of AI

Stop relying on a job title for credibility

It feels like job titles are becoming increasingly less important. They’re more difficult to acquire and the actual work that is done behind those titles is changing anyway.

This means that you have to build credibility beyond just a fancy job title. There are two ways to do this. The first is to build something publicly, something visible that is a credential independent of who hired you. It could be related to your industry and the work that you’re in or it could be completely separate. Practically, it could look like a newsletter on Substack or Medium, a portfolio of graphics you create with Canva, a piece of evidence you submit in response to a government inquiry, even a spreadsheet analysing certain strands of the financial market.

The second is through reputation, which is all about being known by the right people before or regardless of having the ‘right’ job title. And to build a reputation you have to be known. I’m still in a phase of expanding my network by prioritising quantity: saying yes to all the events no matter how tired I am, forcing myself to go up and speak to people. But with the people I do speak to, I always follow up. Even with just a short “it was great to meet you” or “it was interesting to hear about what you’re working on.”

The era of independence and self-sufficiency

Entry-level jobs are where judgment, accountability, adaptability and business context have historically been learned, but this traditional “entry-level jobs are the training wheels for a career” model is being disrupted. And if this environment is disappearing, then where do you get the reps?

In her issue The End of the Career Ladder, Sinéad Bovell argues that the traditional model career model which assumes you get an education, then secure some sort of internship or work experience, find a job and climb the corporate ladder is breaking, and that we’re heading towards (or already in?) what she calls the “Independence Era”, where jobs are becoming more about outsourcing your skills across a range of different projects, businesses and employers.

Here’s where the creativity comes in.

Think about and write down a list of your skills. Everything that you can do, even if you aren’t the best at it. Then think about the different ways you could apply that skill to solve certain problems. For example, if you’re good at graphic design or you’re already writing a Substack you could help a smaller creator build their brand or if you’re good with dogs you could offer to watch your neighbour’s dog on the days that you’re working from home.

Diversify your sources of career capital

If the ladder is disappearing, you need a different shape entirely for your career, and there’s already a word for it: the portfolio career.

Charles Handy, the management thinker who first used the term in the late 1980s, described it as having multiple and diversified sources of income instead of relying on one job at one company. A portfolio career isn’t the same as a side hustle or freelancing between gigs. It’s creating a career which consists of multiple projects, income streams, roles - all of the things that reflect your skills, what you can do and your interests.

If we take this one step further, diversifying your sources of career capital, aka your skills, network, options and reputation, essentially means being well-rounded and a generalist rather than a specialist.

Make a list of the different ways that you are expanding the breadth and the depth of your network. Think about the ways that you are creating options for current and future you. Go back to that list of skills you made and get creative in how you apply them.

What I’m doing outside my 9-5 to achieve these things

1. I’m publishing work outside of my industry.

   This newsletter is my visible, independent credential. It’s not tied to my job title, and it won’t disappear if my job does. Every issue I write is proof of thinking that exists outside my employer's servers, which is the whole point of building credibility you don’t have to ask permission for.

2. I’m tutoring a language one hour each week.

   A couple of months ago I made a list of all the things that I can do which I could monetise - guitar tutoring, language tutoring, dog walking, writing for content creators, LinkedIn content creation, and more. I went for the second one and decided to commit 1 hour every weekend to tutoring English. I’m three months in, and it's already paying off in more ways than one - a small bit of extra income, sure, but also a real, live example of the diversification I keep talking about: another skill, another credential, another item in the portfolio.

3. I’m assessing where I can use AI to help me do my job better and bringing these new findings and learnings to work.

   Like I mentioned, I’ve assessed, using AI, where I can use AI tools to help me do my job better - produce better outputs, more efficiently, faster, more accurately. On top of this, I’m sharing with my team the different ways that I’m using this new tool. Instead of gatekeeping and trying to get ahead of my co-workers, I’ve found that sharing ideas with the team makes my bosses eyes light up. Because not only am I helping myself and the team, I’m helping the business.

Maybe it’s not all doom and gloom. The bottom rung of the corporate ladder - where the entry-level jobs sit - might not disappear. They might take on a new form and demand a different set of skills. Maybe the portfolio career will become the new norm and the 9-5 will be pushed out. Or maybe it won’t. And maybe being a generalist or a specialist will still just depend on the industry you’re in.

Regardless, instead of panicking, or freezing even, I’m trying to think strategically and creatively about my career, coming from a place of curiosity instead of resistance.

Here’s the rule that changed how I think about career growth: spend at least 15 minutes each day doing something that your current job does not require, but your future career will reward.

Most people only start thinking seriously about their careers when they need a new job, a promotion, a higher salary or an escape route. Only then do they start to build the skills, relationships, evidence and confidence that they should’ve starter much earlier. All the things that not only increase the chances of landing a job you genuinely want, but the things that allow you to have options.

I’m making sure that I’m building career capital outside of my 9-5, each and everyday - even if that just means reading one article about the evolution of entry-level jobs in the age of AI or asking ChatGPT to analyse and evaluate the potential impact on a role like mine in the background while I complete another task.

In this issue of Entry Point, I’m breaking down:

• Why career growth should not begin with a job search

• What 15 minutes a day adds up to over time

• The four types of career capital worth building

• Exactly what to do during your daily 15–30 minutes

• The simple daily routine that makes it work

• How and why you should audit your career capital

The “I’ll think about my career when I need to” myth

Last year, McKinsey announced that it would cut 10% of its workforce and LinkedIn exec Aneesh Raman warned that AI is replacing the jobs of early-career professionals. Earlier this month, the CEO of Anthropic said that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar job within the next 5 years.

Entering the job market and trying to secure an entry-level position is becoming increasingly difficult.

So if you’re a student or a young professional, in the early stages of your career, you have to start thinking and building your career more strategically, early on. You can’t rock up to LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever job listing website you’re using anymore and expect to land a job by sending out a hundred applications. You have to build before to increase your chances of success.

What career capital actually is

Career capital is the culmination of your skills, your network, your reputation and your options. Since all these things take time to develop, career capital is created over time.

Building these things doesn’t happen overnight which is why the small habits - the 15 minutes you take out of your day to message a former professor of yours to ask if they’d like to grab a coffee or the 30 minutes you spend going through the flashcards you created for the new Italian vocabulary you’re learning - are what make a difference.

The proof that 15 minutes compounds

Sure, if you can spend an hour a day practicing a new skill outside of your 9-5 or your university work - like learning about AI and how to use it effectively or researching the different ways that your job could evolve and change in the coming years - that’s great. But not everyone has that kind of time. So if all you’ve got is 15 minutes, then that’s great to.

If we break it down, fifteen minutes a day is:

• 1 hour and 45 minutes each week

• Roughly 7.5 hours each month

• More than 91 hours across a year

Think about what you could accomplish for your career in 90 hours: a complete a professional course or qualification, dozens of useful career conversations, a portfolio of you work. Things that add up.

In reality though, when it comes to building a career, the value is not in accumulating hours. It’s in accumulating assets. One conversation could lead to another introduction. One project can become a portfolio example. One new skill may help you perform better at work, giving you a stronger achievement to discuss in interviews.

That is the career version of compounding: each small action increases the value of the actions that follow it.

Everyone on LinkedIn sees the fancy job title and that really cool promotion. In reality, building a career day to day feels like searching for a job all over again, expect that you aren’t sending job applications or scrolling Indeed. You’re doing small things, each and everyday, repetitive moments that move the needle closer to where you want to be.

The 15-minute career capital menu

I’ve taken the buckets of career capital - skills, network, reputation and options - and created a list of 16 specific things you could do in 15 minutes to start building your career capital.

1. Ask AI what your value is in the market

   Give AI an overview of your role, responsibilities, achievements, industry, location and years of experience. Then ask it to assess your current market value, suggest the salary range you might reasonably expect and identify the skills that could make you more valuable. Don’t treat its answer as gospel, but use it as a starting point for your own research. You can run it in the background if it takes longer than 15 minutes.

2. Write down one achievement from your working week

   At the end of the week, write down one thing you did well. It could be a problem you solved, some positive feedback you received, a piece of work you delivered or a moment when you took initiative. Your achievements are much easier to use in an appraisal, interview or job application when you record them as they happen. Record it in your Notes app to keep a log or journal about it in your diary.

3. Update or add one thing to your CV

   You don’t need to overhaul your entire CV every time you open it. Add one new responsibility, improve one bullet point or include a recent result. Updating it in small doses is a lot easier than trying to remember two years’ worth of achievements the week you decide to apply for another job.

4. Post one industry insight on LinkedIn

   Share something you’ve noticed, learned or been thinking about in your industry. It doesn’t need to be a groundbreaking prediction or a 1,000-word essay. A useful observation, a lesson from an event or your take on a recent development is enough to start making your knowledge visible.

5. Comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post

   Writing your own post isn’t the only way to build visibility. Leave a thoughtful comment that adds an example, asks a useful question or offers another perspective. “Great post!” probably isn’t going to start a conversation, but a genuinely interesting contribution might.

6. Reach out to one industry professional or professor that you have spoken to in a while

   Relationships need to be maintained, not just collected. Send a short message asking how they are, referencing something you previously discussed or updating them on what you’ve been doing. You don’t need a big reason to reconnect with someone.

7. Read this article: The Career Bets That Compound (And the Ones That Don’t)

   I loved this article and found it extremely useful to refer back to when I have to make bigger (and also smaller) decisions about my career. It explains why some career decisions continue creating opportunities long after you make them, while others give you little more than a short-term reward. Read it and think about which of your current activities are building skills, relationships, credibility or options that could compound over time.

8. Create a career capital tracker in your Notes app

   I’ve already alluded to this one in point 2. Open your Notes app or take out a piece of paper and write out four headings: skills, evidence, relationships and visibility. Under each one, keep a running list of what you’re building. Over time, you’ll start to see whether your career capital is actually growing, where you have gaps and what you can do to close those gaps.

9. Write a short case study explaining a problem you solved at work

   Choose one problem you’ve worked on and explain the situation, what you did and what changed as a result. This turns a vague responsibility into evidence of what you can actually do. It can later become a CV bullet point, interview example, portfolio piece or LinkedIn post.

10. Save a positive message or piece of feedback

    Screenshot the nice message from your manager. Save the email from the client who loved your work. Keep a record of the comment someone made about how useful your presentation was. Apart from being nice to revisit on a bad day, these messages are evidence of your strengths and the value you provide. I like to take this one step further sometimes and journal about it, reflect on it.

11. Send one thoughtful message to someone in an interesting role without asking for anything

    Not every message needs to include a request for a call, referral or piece of advice. Tell someone you enjoyed an article they wrote, found their career path interesting or appreciated an insight they shared. Building a relationship is a lot easier when your first interaction doesn’t involve asking the other person for a favour. Also, a simple ‘thank you’ can go a long way.

12. Ask a colleague about their career path

    Ask someone how they ended up in their current position, what they did before joining the organisation or which experiences helped them progress. You’ll often learn more about the possible routes through an industry from one honest conversation than you will from reading 20 job descriptions. I usually do this over lunch, if I happen to be eating at the same time as someone else in the office.

13. Arrange one coffee conversation for later in the month

    Choose someone you’d genuinely enjoy learning from or reconnecting with and put something in the calendar. It could be a colleague, former classmate, professor or person working in your industry. One good conversation a month gives you 12 opportunities a year to deepen your relationships and learn something new.

14. Understand the typical next step from your current position

    Look at people who previously held your role and find out what they went on to do. Search LinkedIn, read job descriptions and pay attention to the skills that repeatedly appear in the next level up. You can prepare for your next role much more deliberately once you know what that role is likely to be. Also, I would suggest you factor in AI and how that might change, or not change, things.

15. Write down all your skills (look at your job description) - where are you missing skills and where are you acing

    Pull out your job description and list every skill your role requires. Add the skills you use that aren’t officially written down too. Then mark the areas where you’re already strong, the ones where you need more evidence and the gaps that could eventually limit your progression.

16. Start a list of other organisations you’d be interested in working in

    You don’t need to be actively job hunting to know what else is out there. Keep a running list of organisations doing interesting work, people you might want to learn from and roles you could imagine moving into. Career options are easier to create before you urgently need one.

What this looks like in my 9-5

With my 9-5 schedule this looks like 15 minutes on the bus - messaging one person or listening to a podcast in Italian to practice my language listening skills. Sometimes it looks like a 10 minute chat with my colleague during lunch or 20 minutes after work brushing up my CV, adding a couple bullet points or adding links to my work.

I like to dedicate my mornings to my hardest task, so usually these 15-30 minutes I spend on my career progression come later in the day, after work, or during those ‘in between’ moments - on the bus, at lunch, in a waiting room. In the mornings, I prefer to build and work on my projects, like this Substack newsletter which - arguably - is part of my career capital.

Before you do anything, audit your career capital

It’s tempting to read a list like this and immediately decide that you need to learn a new skill, post more on LinkedIn and arrange five coffee chats. But before adding more things to your to-do list, work out where your career capital is currently strongest and where it’s weakest. I recently did this and it really helped me see where I am strongest and where I have gaps I need to fill. I broke down my audit into the four core components of career capital and asked myself a few questions related to each one. I scribbled it all down in my journal.

Skills: What am I genuinely good at? Which skills are becoming more valuable in my industry? What could stop me from progressing into my next role?

Network: Who knows me, trusts me and understands the kind of work I can do? Am I maintaining my existing relationships, or only contacting people when I need something?

Reputation: What am I currently known for? Do I have evidence that I’m good at what I do, or am I relying on people to take my word for it?

Options: If my current job disappeared tomorrow, what could I do next? Which organisations, industries or roles would realistically be open to me?

You might realise that you have strong skills but very little visibility. Or that you know plenty of people but haven’t kept in touch with any of them. Maybe you’ve done brilliant work, but you haven’t recorded the results anywhere, which means you’d struggle to explain your value in an interview.

That’s the point of the audit. It helps you avoid spending your 15 minutes building something you already have plenty of while ignoring the gap that’s actually holding you back.

Fifteen minutes a day hasn’t transformed my career overnight. But 15 intentional minutes, repeated over months and years, means that I’m actively working on certain skills, building relationships with people who might have an opportunity they can recommend me for in 5 years’ time, and keeping track of evidence I can point to in my next interview.

I’m not waiting until I’m desperate for a new job to start building my next move. I’m starting today. That is the real Entry Point rule.

Many of my friends are either entering the job market for the first time or have recently done so too. We’ve been chatting about our experiences, sharing with one another the things that helped us land jobs and the things that were costly - in time and in money.

In this issue I’m sharing with you everything that I’ve learned about the job hunt. I’m writing about the specific things that myself and the people around me have done that genuinely made a difference. This issue includes advice on everything from what to include in a CV, acing your interview with a good story, making your work visible and automating parts of the search with AI.

Beyond than just being successful and actually landing a job that you genuinely want at the end of the search, I want to help you save time, money, resources and capacity in the process.

In today’s issue I’m covering:

• The difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ job hunting

• Advice on networking, CVs & cover letters, visibility and interviews

• How to use AI to help automate parts of the process

• My 3-phase job search strategy

The difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ job hunting

I think there’s a difference between the ‘passive’ versus ‘active’ (I’m putting them in quotation marks because that’s just how I’m choosing to calling them) approach to job hunting that isn’t spoken about enough - even though it can impact the results of your job hunt (quite) significantly.

To me passive job hunting is when you’re waiting until the job that you want pops up - on your feed, in your inbox, at an event even. It looks like scrolling through LinkedIn job posts and Indeed until you come across a listing that sort of matches your profile and sounds like something you might be interested in. It looks like applying to jobs in mass, focusing on quantity instead of quality, and ending up applying to ones you’re not even that interested in. You’re waiting waiting, hoping something will come up eventually.

On the other hand, active job hunting is about seeking out and even creating job opportunities. It’s reaching out to your network to see what opportunities might be out there, Googling small boutique companies in your industry that might have opportunities which aren’t posted on LinkedIn and applying strategically - prioritising quality over quantity, and while not spending excessive amounts of time tailoring your CV to every single job you’re making sure your profile does align to the job and putting in the effort to demonstrate how. An active approach to the job hunt is about hunting: seeking out and pursuing something, creatively and proactively. In this case, a job.

This isn’t to say that the latter is necessarily better than the former - whether you choose a passive or active approach, or even a combination of the two, will also depend on the type of job you’re looking for, your capacity to give to the job hunt and your individual qualifications, work experience, network size and all of the things that make you you and therefore your experience a very individual one.

So, take all this with a pinch of salt. If something resonates, apply it to your own job hunt. If there’s something you haven’t tried before and think it could be helpful, try it out. The job hunt is a process of trial and error. Certainly for me I tried different things during the search which worked and things that didn’t. Some of those things I will prioritise in my next job hunt, others I won’t be doing again. (pro tip: keep a note of all the things that worked/didn’t work so you can refer back next time around!)

Advice on networking, CVs & cover letters, visibility and interviews

Networking

Start by reaching out to your immediate network - people you know and people who know you. Grab a coffee with them and catch up. Tell them about your wins, what you’re looking for right now in terms of role and organisation. Show them evidence of what you’ve done and can do.

Leverage your network to also get advice and learn from people who are more senior or have also recently been through the job search process. Two months into my job hunt I remembered that my university offers career mentors - alumni who volunteer to provide students and post-graduates with career advice, including how to find a job. I signed up on the university alumni website and was matched with a mentor almost immediately. A couple days later we set up a Teams call and we chatted through my job hunt - what I was doing, my approach to the search, what was working, what didn’t seem to be working - and he offered me advice based on his own experience. What was great about this was that because it was a 1:1 I was able to tell him about my own circumstances and he was then able to give me more specific and applicable advice that what relevant to my case.

Once you’ve exhausted your ‘warm’ network, you can send cold messages, though I wouldn’t recommended spending a huge amount of time on this. In The Modern Career Playbook, Gabriela Flax explains that you should offer the person you’re messaging a solution to a problem that they may have in their work. On top of that, showing the person what you can do will land better than simply just telling them. This could be by attaching an article that you write or video you film to show your thinking and approach.

Creating evidence of value, that is easy for the receiving end to access and see for themselves, is how you stand out and increase your chances of getting a response.

Final thing here - find out if there are any industry-relevant events that you might be able to attend. There are lots that are open to the public, but maybe you can get to smaller invite-only ones through your network too. Those are definitely more valuable because you have someone who can potentially introduce you to other people in the room. Note down the names of anyone you meet. Follow-up. Again, show them what value you could add to their business and their work.

CVs & cover letters

For big corporates and organisations with hundreds maybe even thousands of people, tailoring and optimising your documents for the job is perhaps not the best use of time if your profile doesn’t match the basic requirements. These types of entities will likely receive hundreds of applicants and triage them using AI. If the key words from the job description don’t show up in your CV and cover letter, or in the first standard document the organisation requires you to submit, you’ll most likely be disqualified anyway.

I’d recommend spending time optimising your documents to smaller organisations - say >50 people - that you’re applying to.

A few basic pointers to tailor your cover letter:

• Address the hiring manager by name (e.g. “Dear Alice and hiring team”).

• Mention something specific about the company, team, product or recent project that genuinely interests you.

• Include one or two concrete examples that demonstrate your suitability rather than simply claiming you have certain qualities.

• Explain why you want this role at this company, not just why you want a job.

• Connect your experiences to the skills they’re looking for.

To even smaller organisations, let’s say >20 people, find out who works at the company, who the head of the role that you’re interested in is and message them via email or LinkedIn. Again, show them something you made that aligns to what they do or a problem they may have. It could an article, a newsletter issue, a LinkedIn post, a video, even just a document with specific, helpful and creative bullet points.

With your CV, or resume, keep it simple. Get rid of any fancy fonts, colours or designs. Employers genuinely don’t care if it looks pretty or not. It should look professional. That’s it. Include dates, for each of your entries and where relevant specific metrics (aka numbers). Include a phone number, email address and LinkedIn handle.

My CV top tips:

• Include numbers where possible to specifically and measurably demonstrate what you’ve achieved.

• When you reference pieces of work which you’ve done that are publicly available, included embedded links to them.

• For contact details all you need to include is: a phone number, email address and LinkedIn handle.

• No colours, no ‘fun’ fonts. Times New Roman will do.

Creating visibility

One of the best tips which my ‘mentor’ (from the example in the Networking section) gave me is to do something public and put it on my CV and LinkedIn profile. At the time, I was writing on the side but I hadn’t put it on my LinkedIn. He recommended that I make an online portfolio to have my writing in one place and put ‘Writer’ under ‘Experience’ on LinkedIn with a link to my portfolio.

I spoke about the importance of making your work visible by writing online or speaking publicly in my previous issue “The secret to gaining exposure early on in your career and how to do it” (do check it out for the detail!). In it, I explain that sharing ideas on public platforms like LinkedIn that are industry-relevant, speaking at events and publishing your work online, even if its just on a blog or a Substack or Medium, shows employers your interest and knowledge of the industry or whatever that thing is that you’re writing/speaking about. This isn’t an original idea - Gabriela Flax and Soph Hirst speak about it in The Modern Career Playbook, and so does Karan Dhir in The Career Bets That Compound (And the Ones That Don’t).

Interviews

When you apply for a job, you’re telling a story. Your story. This is the time to explain why you’re the best candidate for the job which you do by telling a persuasive story and supporting your statements with specific metrics and examples. But in order to do this you need to understand the organisation:

Be ready to answer the ‘tell me about yourself’ question because this is one of the first questions you’re likely to get and will really set the tone for the rest of the interview. look into any projects and work that they’ve published online, an event they’ve recently attended which you find interesting. Find something specific - that isn’t so obvious or easy to find - and bring it up. Show your curiosity in that thing. Ask a question about it. Show that your profile aligns in some way to that thing.

Here’s how I’d break down the ‘tell me about yourself’ question in a story format:

1. Where you started. Briefly explain your background, what you’re studying (or studied), and the experiences that first sparked your interest in the field.

2. What you’ve done. Highlight the most relevant experiences, projects, internships, societies, or achievements that have helped you develop the skills and knowledge needed for the role.

3. Where you’re going next. Explain why you’re interested in this specific opportunity, how it fits into your career goals, and why you’re excited about the company or organisation.

Practice your answer again and again. Until you’ve mastered it.

And of course, this goes without saying, at the end of the interview, when the interviewer and if you have any questions, be prepared with questions. The worst thing you can do is say you have no questions. And the more specific the better because it shows that you’ve done your research, that you’ve taken the time to really understand the company, its culture, what it does, who they are.

Using AI in the job hunt

I’ve written about the reality of AI becoming - and in many instances being - a part of the workplace as a reality which isn’t helpful to deny in my issue [insert issue].

Use AI in the job hunt - but not to write your applications and your answers to interview questions. I prefer to use AI to automate certain tasks that are time-consuming but not cognitively demanding. For example, I’ll use it to summarise meetings using the Co-Pilot Custom Summary which is a great tool to pull out only what you want/need from the meeting. I’ll also use it to edit drafts of emails I write and help me manage my job tracker on excel - I’ll ask it to tell me if I’m focusing too much on one area, for example networking, and not enough on actual written application submissions. I could an entire issue about this so let me know if that’s something you’d want…

AI can also help you identify skill gaps. Paste in your CV and a job description and ask: “What experiences or skills am I missing?” This can reveal opportunities to join a society, take on a project, complete a course, or build evidence that strengthens future applications.

My job search strategy

Phase 1: The Prep

Before you do anything there’s two things you need to be clear on with yourself: first, what type of job and organisation you’re looking for? Second, decide on your approach: are you going to be applying in quantity or in quality? Or a mix? Tailor your job hunt to your answer to the first question.

Phase 2: Research

Do the deep research. Spend 1-2 hours researching the types of roles which exist that match your profile and what you’re looking for and finding out what organisations exist that you’d want to work for. Make a list of organisations, maybe people you come across in those organisations that you could reach out to, roles. Log everything.

Phase 3: Execute

Before you do anything update your CV (I actually recommend that you update your CV while you’re in a job or having a specific experience so that you don’t forget). Make sure you’ve got your most up-to-date experience, education and qualifications on there.

Then go to your network: industry professionals you met at university events, former colleagues, professors. Reach out and let them know that you’re looking for work, ask them for advice. Then go to the cold outreach.

Once you’ve exhausted your immediate network get on the platforms like LinkedIn, and Indeed. Research the organisations and the companies before you submit an application. Find out who the hiring manager is. Address them in your cover letter. Tailor your CV.

I hope you learned something from this and do apply anything you found useful to your own job hunt.

That’s all for this week!

All of this the result of making my work visible by writing publicly for a student organisation.

You hear it all the time: exposure is important early on in your career. Exposure to people. Exposure to different jobs and roles and companies. Exposure allows you try see and learn about different things which will help you figure out what you want and don’t want to do. It creates opportunities that you wouldn’t have come across elsewhere.

But no one really teaches you how to gain exposure. That’s what I’m writing about today.

In today’s issue:

• The mutually inclusive relationship between visibility and exposure

• Why joining a student society at university is the #1 best thing you can do for exposure

• 4 practical ways to make your work visible as a student

• 3 things to do next week to get started

• A personal close

• Resources

  

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The mutually inclusive relationship between visibility and exposure

The first step to gaining exposure to an industry - whether you’re a student or not - is to make yourself and your work visible to the people in that industry.

Sure, you could find go online and find events that are open to all, but if you want to be more strategic and receive invites to closed events where there may be more value to be gleaned from - due to a smaller circle of people attending making it easier to network or a more niche type of person from a specific part of the industry - you need people to invite you. And for people to invite you they need to know you and before that they need to find you.

The more clearly people understand what you do and what you’re good at, the more likely they are to think of you when something relevant comes up - like that event - bring opportunities to you and create new exposure you didn’t have to engineer yourself.

In her viral article “how to enter side doors”, Maja explains two different ways to enter the job market (‘side doors’, as she calls it) or industry in our case.

An outbound approach is when you are the one doing the reaching out - sending out emails, cold messaging, asking to attend an event. An inbound approach, on the other hand, is about making yourself visible enough that other people can find you.

This idea of gaining access via an inbound approach is reinforced by Karan Dhir’s “The Career Bets That Compound (And the Ones That Don’t).” One of the best decisions you can make to accelerate your career, he says, is to make your work visible.

“Writing, speaking, building in public — pick one. A consistent public footprint around one specific area of expertise is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career, and almost no one does it.”

Visibility leads to exposure leads to visibility leads to exposure.

Why joining a student society at university is the #1 best thing you can do for exposure

By writing for the business society and putting my work out there I created conditions for exposure in two ways.

First, it meant that I would be invited to industry events because I was contributing to something bigger than me. And by bigger than me I mean the society. Because the society was set up to help students meet professionals and learn about industry, I was automatically invited.

Second, it meant that people in the committee of the society - people more ‘senior’ than I (I put senior in quotations because at the end of the day we are all still students) - knew my name. The Editor-in-Chief put in a good word for me. And more of my course mates found out who I was without me having to reach out to every single person. People started to approach me.

If visibility is about increasing the number of people who know who you are and what you are interested in, then student societies are a fantastic a platform to do exactly that. Whether you write articles, organise the events, manage the socials or run sponsorships, you’re making yourself known to the right people. The byproduct is a portfolio of evidence for the work that you’re doing.

4 practical ways to make your work visible as a student

If you’re starting out at university, there’s a few great ways to make your work visible

1. Write for a student publication. Most universities have student-run newspapers, magazines, or online journals. They might be associated with a particular student society or organisation (or not - they may simply be affiliated with the university as a whole).

Not only does it put your name on work that is publicly accessible, but it also builds a writing habit that will serve you in almost any career and gives you something concrete to point to when someone asks what you’ve been doing outside your degree.

2. Attend your professors’ office hours. Not just to chat about coursework. Attend office hours with genuine curiosity about the subject that professor teaches or the research that they are working on. Do this enough and you’ll become a student your professor knows, remembers, and - if you’ve made a good impression - mentions to other people. That mention, to a colleague, a visiting speaker or a former student now working in your industry, is a form of visibility.

3. Join the committee of a student society. Being a member of a society is great. Being on the committee is something else entirely. A committee role puts you in charge of things like events, communications, budgets, partnerships with external organisations which gives you a legitimate context (or ‘excuse’) in which to reach out to professionals, invite speakers and build relationships that would be difficult to initiate cold. It also gives you a specific, concrete thing to talk about in every interview for the next couple of years.

4. Help a professor do research and share something about it publicly (if you can). If a professor of yours is working on something that interests you, ask if there’s any way you can contribute - data collection, literature reviews, background research. Many will say yes, particularly if you’ve already built a relationship through office hours.

The second part - sharing something about it publicly, even briefly - is what converts that experience into visibility. A short LinkedIn post once a week about what you’re working on and what you’re learning from it can go a long way. Similarly, a newsletter with content related to the research you’re doing or even about how you’re doing research is also a great idea.

3 things to do next week to get started

1. Share an idea. Share just one idea on LinkedIn. Or if you have a newsletter, write something short - it doesn’t have to be perfect - and publish it. Get your work out there.

2. Reach out to someone. Message/email one new person in your field. Attend/sign up for an industry or networking event. Book office hours with a professor. Grab a coffee with an alumni or a student working or interning in the field.

3. Audit your own visibility. Google yourself. Check what comes up on LinkedIn. Ask yourself: if someone looked me up today, what would they find? Then do one thing to improve the answer - update a bio, publish something, add a project.

A personal close

The number one thing that helped me land a job (relatively) quickly after graduation was a product of 3 years of actively making my work visible.

I’m just shy of 18 months into my career and still actively putting myself out there: I make an effort to attend networking and industry events outside of work and continue to publish work online with different media agencies and news publications. It’s definitely not an easy thing to do. Walking into a room in which you know no one is terrifying. But once you get talking to people, it’s not so bad. I’m still researching and trying to find other ways to make myself visible.

If there’s one thing to take away from this issue it’s this: the secret to gaining exposure starts with visibility. And only you can create that visibility.

Resources

• How to Build Visibility and Impact – Without Waiting 10 Years

• how to enter side doors

• The Career Bets That Compound (And the Ones That Don’t)

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When I was doing my social sciences degree a couple of years ago I felt like I was learning lots in terms of content - all the theories and the debates around the subject. I became very good at skimming academic journal articles, synthesising a mass of information - at pace and at scale - formulating arguments grounded in theory and throwing together footnotes in a very short span of time. But none of it felt practical. I wasn’t coding, I wasn’t solving maths equations and I certainly wasn’t reading financial statements.

What was I going to tell potential employers that I could actually do? And how was I going to demonstrate any “real” skills?

In today’s issue, I’m breaking down:

• 4 high-value skills you need to learn at university

• How to tailor them to the specific job, role or industry that you want to work in

• Different ways to demonstrate those skills

• Personal note

4 high-value skills you need to learn at university

These are a few high-value skills that you can learn at university to help you get ahead in any corporate or industry job. And unlike specific technical knowledge, these skills remain valuable regardless of sector, job title or how the world of work evolves.

1. Data literacy. We live in a world increasingly driven by data. Whether you work in consulting, marketing, finance, government, technology or healthcare, organisations are constantly collecting information and making decisions based on it.

Data literacy is the ability to understand, interpret and communicate insights from data. This does not necessarily mean becoming a data scientist or learning advanced statistics. It means being comfortable collecting information at pace and at scale, identifying patterns, interpreting data, asking good questions and using evidence to support decisions. Graduates who can combine critical thinking with data-driven reasoning are more valuable than those who rely solely on intuition, feelings or “vibes”.

2. Writing succinctly and coherently. Strong writing is underrated. In almost every job, you will spend a significant amount of time communicating through emails, reports, briefs, presentations and messages.

The ability to explain complex ideas clearly, structure your thoughts logically, and get to the point quickly is incredibly valuable. Execs rarely have time to read lengthy documents, which means concise communication often has a greater impact than lengthy analysis. Learning how to write clearly and persuasively will make your ideas easier to understand and increase your professional credibility.

3. AI fluency. I know many of you will not want to hear this one, but the reality is that AI is here to stay for the foreseeable future - unless the data centres somehow shut down in which case we probably have bigger problems on our hands anyway.

AI fluency is not about replacing your own thinking; it is about understanding how AI tools can help you research faster, automate repetitive tasks, generate ideas, analyse information, improve productivity. The graduates who gain an advantage will not necessarily be those who know the most about AI, but those who understand where it adds value, where it falls short, and how to integrate it into their workflows responsibly.

4. Presenting, story telling and ‘public’ speaking. Like writing, ability to orally communicate ideas confidently is often what separates good work from recognised work. You may have the best analysis or the most creative idea, but it will have limited impact if you can’t explain it effectively to others. Presenting, storytelling and public speaking are skills that help you persuade others and build confidence in your ideas.

University offers countless opportunities to practise these skills through seminars, presentations, societies and group projects. But sometimes you do have to put yourself out there and seek out those opportunities yourself. While many people avoid public speaking because it feels uncomfortable, developing this skill early can create a significant advantage throughout your career.

How to tailor them to the specific job, role or industry that you want to work in

The beauty is that these skills are widely applicable, but you can also tailor them to a more specific job that you know you want.

Obviously, not all of these skills will have the same level importance in different jobs or industries even. Perhaps you prioritise and spend more time getting really good at organising large datasets and learning how to do OSINT collection because you know you want a research role. Or perhaps you know you’re most likely going to start working at one of the big consulting firms so you prioritise your presentation skills.

Also, depending on the job or industry you’re interested in you may approach the particular skill in a different, more tailored way. If you know you want to work in marketing you might look to hone your presentation skills by learning graphic design to tell stories about products you’re selling. Versus in consulting where you’ll want to practice how to sell a recommendation or a solution.

Different ways to demonstrate these skills

Learning a skill is one thing. Demonstrating it to employers is another.

The good news is that you do not need years of professional experience to prove you have these skills. University provides plenty of opportunities to build evidence of them.

1. Data literacy. Conduct a dissertation or research project involving data analysis. Create dashboards or visualisations using Excel, Power BI or Tableau. Complete online courses and publish small data projects on GitHub. Analyse trends, survey results or public datasets for student societies or personal projects.

2. Writing. Write for a student newspaper, blog or newsletter. Publish articles on LinkedIn or Substack about topics that interest you. Produce research briefs, policy papers or case studies. Build a portfolio with your writing.

3. AI fluency. Use AI tools to support research, productivity or content creation and document the process. Build small AI-assisted workflows that automate repetitive tasks. Complete AI-related certifications or courses. Showcase projects where AI helped you achieve a better outcome more efficiently.

4. Presenting, storytelling and public speaking. Deliver presentations during university modules. Join debating, public speaking or entrepreneurship societies. Present research findings at conferences or student events. Create videos, podcasts or webinars that demonstrate your ability to communicate ideas clearly.

Employers are won’t care if you say you have a skill if you can’t evidence that you can apply it in practice.

A bonus skill

Languages.

Languages are one of the most underrated skills you can develop at university, especially as a social sciences student. While English remains the dominant language of international business, being able to communicate in another language can open doors to opportunities that many candidates simply cannot access.

Plus, learning a language demonstrates much more than linguistic ability. It shows discipline, curiosity, cultural awareness and the willingness to tackle difficult problems over a long period of time.

You don’t need to become fluent to benefit. Even reaching a conversational level in a strategically important language can help differentiate you from other graduates. Whether you are interested in business, government, consulting, technology or international affairs, language skills can become a powerful form of career capital that compounds over time.

Personal note

Although I should have, I didn’t deliberately hone any of these skills during university. I certainly didn’t make an effort to develop literacy in data collection, management and cleanliness, nor did I make the time to practice quantitative data analysis. I was never a maths person and so I didn’t think that I’d need to learn about data - how it’s collected, managed, processed, communicated. Oh, how I was wrong.

The lesson isn’t that you need to become really good at all of these skills while you’re still at university. The reality is that you won’t have the time to and you probably won’t want to anyway. So pick just one or maybe two and think about how they will be applicable to the job or industry that you see yourself working in.

And if you don’t know what the job or industry looks like go with the presentation and writing skills - because I guarantee that they will be useful regardless.

If you’re reading this and you’re at university the single most useful thing I can tell you is: stop optimising for good grades. Start optimising for useful skills that will help you in your career.

I would argue that it is – if you use what university actually has to offer, outside the substance of the lectures and seminars, and you don’t make these mistakes.

Let’s get into it.

5 mistakes students are making at university

1. Trying to get perfect grades. If you want to pursue a career in academia then sure, aim for a first class degree. But anything else, especially corporate, instead of spending your time trying to get your marks from a 73% to an 80%, spend your time optimising everything else university offers: build real, long-lasting relationships with your professors, attend department events and talk to the speakers, cold message industry professionals and learn about the skills that you need to be working on so that you’re really prepared for a career in your field.

2. Building shallow relationships with your professors. Spend time with your professors. Book their office hours, have a chat about the research project they’re working on or booking that they’re writing. Ask them about their career. Be curious and genuinely show interest. Attend their office hours every couple of weeks, not just when you need their help writing your essay.

3. Not making an effort to understand your industry and the skills that you need. Many students don’t make an effort to understand what the real, practical skills are that they’ll need for a particular role in a particular industry. If you want to get into research you probably want to learn some OSINT skills, if you want to be client-facing, learn about how to do sales, if you want to go into marketing pick up graphic design.

4. Going too broad. If you’re trying to attend every event across a number of different student societies and university departments, you’re going too broad. What I mean by this is that there it helps to become “specialised” in a particular industry . Obviously, at the start of to her career you want to keep your options open and expose yourself to different kinds of opportunities and industries but spreading yourself too thin can also be costly.

5. Starting to build your CV after university. If you don’t have a CV, with legitimate evidence of things that you’ve done that is related to the industry in which you are applying for work, you’re already behind. Build your CV throughout university. Don’t wait until your last year, and certainly don’t wait until graduation.

Action points

Before you close this tab, do one of these this week:

• Book your professor’s office hours (not to talk about your essay!)

• Find one industry professional on LinkedIn who has the role you want in three to five years, and send them a connection request with a personalised note.

• Write down the three skills most commonly listed in job descriptions for the role you want.

• Open a blank document and start your CV today.

• Sign up to one event relevant to your field of interest.

There’s no guardrail to tell you what to do and what not to do during university to maximise your chances of securing a job you want and building a career you love after graduation.

Those are just a few of the mistakes I’ve observed students, myself included, make during university which costs them both money and time in terms of building their career.

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In an attempt to answer these questions I sat down to reflect on the things that helped me to land my job (relatively) quickly after graduating.

Spoiler: it wasn’t getting a first or writing a thesis. It was something(s) else, with a much greater cumulative effect and which shaped my career trajectory well before I was even aware.

In today’s issue I’m breaking down:

• What “career capital” is

• Why I created career capital while I was still at university

• 5 specific things I did to create career capital before graduating

• The things I didn’t do enough of (and that I should’ve done more of)

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What is career capital?

I’ve been seeing this term “career capital” floating around online. Yes, it’s a bit of a corporate jargony-type of catch phrase but it’s helpful nonetheless.

Karan Dhir sums up the concept of a career as such:

A career is the accumulation of four kinds of capital: skill capital — what you can actually do, at a level few others can; network capital — who knows you, trusts you, and would take your call; reputation capital — what people who don’t know you personally think when they hear your name; and optionality capital — the breadth and quality of doors that open to you when you knock.

In an article for 80,000 Hours, Benjamin Todd describes career capital as “skills, connections, and credentials.” It’s a currency, something you can exchange for opportunities and leverage.

Really, career capital is a collection of things over time that make you valuable in your field or industry: skills, knowledge, people, reputational.

Why I created career capital while I was still at university

Upon reflect, I started to create career capital while I was still at university (and arguably even before that - when I spoke to my teachers and counsellors at school and pick my degree and university).

Right now, the gap between graduating and actually being employable is wider than most people expect especially in more competitive fields like tech and finance.

Working harder in university and getting the best grades doesn’t guarantee a job.

So getting ahead doesn’t mean competing with your peers to outperform them or trying to get the highest marks on every paper that you submit. It means making decisions that will compound and help you start to build a career even before you’ve ‘started’ it. It means being deliberate about how you use your time and resources at university to collect skills, connections, options, reputations.

6 ways to create career capital before graduating

1. Connect with at least one new person per week. Exposure is your best friend at university and early on in your career as well.

Each week I connected with at least one new person. It might have been a networking event set up by my department or going to an industry social after class. But it didn’t look like that a lot of the time and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a face-to-face. It might look like a LinkedIn message to the author of an article you read online related to the industry you’re working in, or asking a professor whether they know anyone in the industry doing something that you’d like to find out more about and then an email to that person.

2. Go deep in one society student/association/club. Pick one student society/association/club that is related to the industry that you want to work in, or if you’re not sure what that looks like just yet, a field that you’re somewhat interested in: tech, VC, defence, STEM. Whatever it is, I guarantee you a society for it exists. And if it doesn’t, set it up.

In my first year at university, I joined a student society which was industry-specific, and from there I worked my way up. What do I mean by this? I started by going to the events that the society set up with speakers from across the industry. I then applied to a Staff Writer position, working closely with the committee. In second year I graduated to Editor, and by the start of my third year I was President of the society. My decision to pour time, energy and resource into the society compounded: it opened doors for me to meet industry professionals, to show them that I was ambitious, interested and capable; it allowed me to hone certain soft skills like leadership and teamwork that aren’t always so evident to practice in a university setting or demonstrate on a CV right out of university.

3. Make yourself and your work visible inside and outside the university. Write or do public speaking on a niche topic, preferably around your industry or job of interest. This isn’t an easy one to do and the returns might not be so obvious, especially when you first get started. But once people start to notice your work or come to your talks, more people will do so. You’ll have conversation starters, you’ll begin to build a reputation and you’ll even deepen your knowledge on the things that you talk about. The effect is a compounding one.

Throughout university I wrote for journals, magazines and news agencies to make my work visible. There was no shortage of student associations, networks and different groups with publications. Eventually, I reached out to agencies outside of university.

4. Build real relationships with your professors. Your professors have networks. Maybe they worked in industry before they went into academia. Or maybe they were always academia - either way they will know people. Attend their office hours on a regular basis, every 2 weeks, let’s say, and bring with you ideas, questions and genuine interest in their current or previous work. And who knows, maybe they’re working on a research project that you could support.

Not to mention, they’ll also be the ones to write your letter(s) of recommendation, which is a lot easier to do if they know you.

5. Work on and build a specific side project. Pick something - it could be something you’re genuinely interested in or want to try like an entrepreneurial venture or a Substack publication or a coding course - and work on it. Spend a couple of hours a week on it. It should be yours by which I mean it should be an initiative that you started, drove forward or stood up.

The key is that there’s no pressure for it to be successful or make you a million dollars. Because even if your venture fails you’ll still have something to show for on your CV, to talk about during interviews and when you network. You’ll be able to demonstrate that you’re driven, work hard and proactive. You’ll learn things along the way, maybe meet new people. You’ll have a story to tell.

The things I didn’t do enough of (and that I should’ve done more of)

1. Connected with more people outside of my area and industry of interest. This one is tricky because arguably it’s better to specialise, double down and put all your efforts into connecting with people in your field of interest and honing niche skills to maximise your chances of landing a job in that field.

But early on in your career, what’s more important is exposure. Exposure to different fields. Exposure to different jobs. Exposure to different people and different kinds of work. Exposure is important because it allows you to be more certain about what you want and don’t want to do later on. And the earlier you get that sorted the sooner you can start to specialise in that thing you absolutely know you want to do.

2. Learned about what’s really valuable in my field. I should’ve spent more time understanding and learning about what really matters in the job that I wanted to do and the field I wanted to do it in. The reason is that I could’ve started learning and honing certain skills a lot earlier, perhaps shortening the amount of time it took me to land my job.

Do most professionals in your field haver Master’s degrees? PhDs? What do the entry-level jobs look like? Is there a particular area that is perhaps less saturated and competitive? Which could help you get your foot in the door? What skills do I need and what kind of knowledge will help me in this industry? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself.

3. Copied other people. I wasn’t deliberate enough about trying to figure out what was working for my peers whom I’d consider “successful” - the ones that landed the internships and got the research positions. The ones that were doing things outside of university to gain industry experience and talk to more professionals. Identify who’s getting ahead of the game and what they’re doing differently to everyone else.

If you’ve just started university, don’t optimise for perfect grades. Optimise instead for the things that actually build a career.

Because the truth is that your career doesn’t start when you graduate. It starts at university.

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None of the presenters were particularly bad, but there was one speaker who stood out to me and had my whole and undivided attention despite being the last presentation of the afternoon.

Upon reflection, there are a few reasons why I think he was so captivating: he was funny (bonus), he paused frequently, spoke slowly, used common words and sentences, and broke concepts and ideas down so simply it felt like a guide for dummies. He didn’t rush, he didn’t ramble, he didn’t overcomplicate the topic, didn’t over explain or use any fancy lingo. And during the Q&A, when asked questions, he took a minute to think, and then answered it directly, didn’t beat around the bush or give one of those half-ass, ‘not-really-answering-the question’ answer.

Simply put, he communicated well.

In fact he communicated with such clarity and confidence that it has made me acutely aware of my own communication which I realise does need some working on. I want to be articulate and well-spoken, and I want to be listened to, closely, with attention, not just because I am knowledgeable but also because I am clear and confident.

This issue is about why so many of us - myself included - communicate in ways that aren’t that useful, and what we can actually do to change this.

In today’s issue:

• Why you’re not communicating clearly

• The consequences of poor communication

• What the best speakers do differently

• 4 practical ways to improve your communication

Why you’re not communicating clearly

The number one reason why people don’t communicate things clearly and confidently is because they aren’t sure in their own minds about what it is that they want to say. They may have a vague idea of what it might be but there’s no real structure or purpose to it.

Second, if you’re over explaining, rambling and justifying things that don’t need justification to protect yourself from being wrong, from sounding too direct or from being held to something, you’re not communicating well. When you over explain or justify things for no real reason, you sound more uncertain and as a result reduce the trust which your audience should have in you for them to keep listening. Really, you’re undermining what you’re saying.

Separately, I’ve found that sometimes when I’m presenting something or going through a piece of work - maybe something I’ve put together on an Excel spreadsheet - that I rush, don’t start from the top, and don’t pause. I’m just trying to get through whatever it is I need to get through. But I’m not doing it deliberately. Part of it I think is a fear that I’m wasting someone’s time, part of it might just be nerves. As a semi-socially anxious person my nerves do crop up quite often when it comes to speaking to people - in particular my colleagues, especially execs and those who are more senior or who I’d consider “older and more experienced” than I.

The consequences of poor communication

There are consequences to poor communication - and they don’t just affect the people whom you are communicating to. There affect you, too.

One thing that happens is lost time - and probably more of it than you’d expect. Emails that aren’t clear generate clarifying replies, meetings without a clear purpose create follow-up meetings and tasks that weren’t properly specified get done incorrectly and need to be redone. Ambiguous messages are costly in terms of attention, time and energy that could have been quite easily avoided.

The second thing that happens is eroded trust which I’ve already touched on. To quote Brené Brown: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When someone communicates vaguely - when you’re never quite sure what they need or what they mean - it becomes difficult to rely on them, not because they’re unreliable as a person, but because the communication around them creates uncertainty. And uncertainty, sustained over time, is exhausting to work with.

The third thing, and this is one I find most interesting, is that unclear communication tends to make the person doing it look less capable than they are. Being direct and assertive reads as confidence. Excessive explanation and justification reads as uncertainty, even if the underlying thinking is sound. You can have a sharp, well-considered view and completely undermine that with poor communication. The colleague who says it plainly will almost always be perceived as more credible - not because they’re smarter, but because they’re clearer.

What the best speakers do differently

Over the last couple of months, I’ve observed observed and notes the things which my colleagues do that I think make them good communicators - in particular, the ones who leave you knowing exactly what they meant and what’s needed next. I created a list of these things in my Notes app on my phone.

They lead with the point and the purpose. The best communicators put the most important information first. The context, the caveats, the content - those come after you’ve stated and made clear the purpose. The instinct for most people is the reverse: to build up to the point, lay the groundwork and make the other person has everything they need before landing the actual message. Good communicators invert this and lead instead with the point.

They know why they’re in the room. Before any important discussion the best communicators know exactly what outcome they’re trying to reach. Not generally, not vaguely, specifically. “By the end of this conversation, I need a decision on X” is very different from “I think we need to talk about X” because it’s specific and that specificity shapes what happens next. This goes for questions, too: “What do you think?” is not a question. “Do you think we should approach the client before or after we’ve finalised the proposal?” is a question.

They match the medium to the message. Not everything needs a meeting. Not everything can be handled by a message. Good communicators make deliberate choices about how they communicate - maybe a brief Teams message for something simple, a call for anything that needs a bit more brainstorming around, a written brief for anything where there needs to be a record. Most people default to the medium they’re most comfortable with rather than the one that best serves the communication.

4 practical ways to improve your communication

Here’s to “how-to” part of the issue.

1. Audit the words and sentences you use

Open your Notes app or take out a piece of paper and write down all of the situations in the last week in which you came away feeling like you hadn’t communicated clearly.

Then, if you can go through meeting transcripts or recordings do so. Listen to yourself speak (or if you’re going through a transcript read through what you said) and notice where you’ve used filler words such as “like…”, or “essentially...”. Notice where maybe you started to ramble or speed up. Also go through all the emails you sent last week and maybe any requests you sent to colleagues in Teams or Slack. Note down every time you used words and phrases like “I was just wondering if”, “hope that’s OK”, “No worries if not”, “sorry to bother you”.

2. Write it down or record yourself

Before you speak, write it down. Or record yourself. If you really don’t want to record yourself because it’s uncomfortable, just say it out loud. You’re not doing it to memorise a script but rather as a way to force yourself to organise your thoughts and make sure that you’re clear - with yourself, on the purpose and the main points that you want to convey.

Most unclear communication starts not with bad execution but with a fuzzy premise, not knowing exactly what it is you want to achieve. Forcing yourself to take a moment and think through what you want to say and how you want to say it will not only improve your clarity of speech but also your confidence.

3. Copy the people you know

I’m sure you know someone who you think articulates and speaks well. I know I do. Think about the things that that person does or says which make them clear in their prose and confident in their delivery.

For example, I’ve noticed that my boss starts every meeting with: “the intention of this meeting is to x”. And he finishes every meeting with: “action points off the back of this include y and z”. He also does something I find incredibly impressive and haven’t really seen anyone else do: when he catches himself rambling or going off in a different direction than was intended in the conversation, he literally reels himself back in. He pauses, says something along the lines of “let me take a step back” and will make a hand gesture to go with it, motioning a sort of backwards step.

4. Expand your vocabulary

Sometimes I hesitate and stumble in dialogue simply because I don’t have the words that I’m looking for. Vocabulary is the basis of articulation and so having more specific words that you can use to convey certain ideas or concepts is incredibly valuable.

“Words have meaning”, my high school economics teacher used to say.

You can expand your vocabulary by reading widely and more deliberately. By more widely, maybe pick up a book or an article in a genre you wouldn’t usually gravitate towards. By ‘more deliberately’ I mean pick out the words you don’t know, look them up and apply them, with intention, in dialogue. You can do this in conversation as well: notice words that people use which are unfamiliar to you, are precise in their meaning, and are useful.

I guess the lesson I learned from the last week’s speaker is that it is OK - preferable even - to dumb down ideas and complex concepts, to pause before you answer a question, to state things as they are.

And what’s more - we can all learn and practice these things.

Happy Saturday x

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Here is a mix of 20 things I got to do, participate in, experience, lessons I learned and challenges I encountered working at a startup in 2025.

1. (Pretty much) everyone is figuring it out, including the people above you

   Once I realised this I actually felt a lot more OK about the fact that I was very junior. When I first joined I felt so much imposter syndrome. But once I realised that in a startup (mostly) everyone is kind of figuring out how entrepreneurship and startups work I started to feel a more comfortable being uncomfortable.

2. Having high standards and ambition is NOT a bad thing

   Being ambitious is not a toxic trait. Hustling and working hard are not “bad” unless they come at the detriment of your own or others’ wellbeing. I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want to live slowly. I want to reach for the stars, dream big and put the work in to make that happen.

3. When you join a small business, you understand what an entire business actually does

   When there’s only 2-10 other employees, you learn who does what, for what reason and to what end. You learn about how logistics, travel and finance, are organised. You learn the real meaning of ‘scale’ and why it’s seen as such a critical item for startups.

4. I participated in meetings that had nothing to do with my job description

   I got to sit in while my boss negotiated deals over lunch, when he brainstormed collaborations with potential partners. As a fly on the wall, I learned by seeing how these things happened in practice.

5. Assume ownership

   Startups tend to hire people who can get things done. People who can and will step up, assume more rather than less ownership and execute effectively. Taking initiative and assuming ownership will get you ahead of people who don’t

6. I had eyes on the contracts

   In a big corporation you don’t get to see the profits that are made, the revenue, the contracts, at least not in the detail that I did. Seeing numbers gave me an idea of scale, and seeing how contracts are worded and arranged gave me an idea of the different components that are agreed and which make a contract legal binding.

7. I had access to the CEO

   Now this one is gold. I saw the CEO almost everyday in the corridors of the office, at the coffee station in the kitchen, in some of our meetings. That access is rare so I tried to make the absolute most of it - especially as he is very open to fresh ideas and alternate perspectives.

8. I got to influence and shape how things are done (aka build processes)

   One of the pros to the lack of structures, mechanisms, processes, workflows if you will, that were in place to get things done was that I got to shape and influence them. I offered feedback in terms of where there were inefficiencies, I wrote up processes for my role and how it interacted with different elements of the team at different moments in time and created, from scratch, a project management tool which our team still uses to this day.

9. Curiosity will always be welcomed

   Someone who is curious, who is eager to learn, is interested - truly interested - in getting to know things, how they work and are built and created will be rewarded. I built a habit of asking more questions and have become a lot better at asking more pointed and deliberate ones.

10. If you don’t know why you’re in a meeting you probably should be there

    Same thing goes for if you have nothing to add to the discussion. Startups can’t afford to have meetings with people who don’t need to be there so if you’re ever wondering why you’re in a room you probably shouldn’t be.

11. Bring excitement everywhere you go

    A small team needs energy to move forward. It’s not the structures and the processes that will move it forward because those things probably don’t exist just yet. It’s drive, excitement, energy that will move the needle. Bring that Type A energy to the party.

12. It is OK to choose speed over perfection

    Not always. But sometimes - many times even - the speed at which you can deliver a piece of work should be prioritised over trying to get it from 97% to 100%. As a perfectionist this one doesn’t come easy to me, but I’ve learned that getting it done is sometimes better than spending the extra time trying to perfect the dot on every i.

13. A lot of the time, it is in fact about who you know

    I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes at this one. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), who you know matters. You network, your ability to both expand and nurture it, matters. Network like a badger.

14. Don’t be lazy!

    Yes, hard work will be rewarded, but when I say don’t be lazy I mean put in the effort, care to understand why you’re doing things.

15. Always be thinking about the 5 “W’s”

    WHAT am I creating? To WHAT end?

    WHY am I putting together this presentation?

    WHO am I writing this document for?

    WHEN is the deadline?

16. Don’t make assumptions

    I have a terrible habit of assuming that people know more than me, especially my superiors. After all I am young, inexperienced and junior. But this is completely untrue. If someone says something you disagree with, don’t just assume it whatever they’re saying is “correct” or the “right” way to think or go about the thing that you’re doing. Question it, suggest an alternative, put forth what you believe. Don’t assume that someone knows more than you because while they might, they might also not.

17. There is power in saying no

    I have a hard time saying no to people. I am, indeed, a chronic people pleaser though I’m slowly transitioning out of that. When your team is small and there are objectives to meet, there are certain opportunities and things that you will have to pass on and say no to. Get comfortable saying no and realise that the power in doing so lies in the ability to be laser-focused on the objectives at hand.

18. Time management = prioritisation

    Maybe obvious but time management isn’t about time blocking your calendar with pretty pastel colours or making a to-do list every morning. Time management is the ability to prioritise your tasks, and in a startup, where resource is scarce, you need to be able to prioritise. Prioritise monthly, weekly, daily.

19. You can just say things as they are

    It’s OK to dumb things down, to remove the fluff and the bs and just say things as they are.

20. Teamwork is not optional so don’t work in silo

    At some point - in your career and in life - you will have to work and collaborate with others. So get used to it. Educate yourself on what makes a good team player. Learn about the dynamics of the most effective teams. Here’s a good resource (shoutout to Daniel Hemhauser):

    The PM Playbook

    How to Build High-Performing Teams: The Key to Project Success

    "A project’s success is built on the strength of its team—cultivate trust, foster collaboration, and inspire motivation to achieve exceptional results together…

    Read more

    2 years ago · 1 like · Daniel Hemhauser

I guess what they say is true: when you join big corporate you have no idea what the whole business does. You do your job and sort of work in silo with your team or department or division.

But when you join a business that’s 3, 4, 5 people, you learn what the whole company does and the weekly activity of the entire team, which gives you a feel for how it all actually works. In practice.

The point of this issue wasn’t to glamorise working at a startup. Like big corporate - and like most things in life - there are pros and there are cons. For me, the pros have outweighed the cons and I’ve learned a lot of valuable things. There’s also lots of factors and circumstances around the startup itself that will impact someone’s experience like the industry the startup is operating in - is it growing or dying - the culture (yes there is still a culture even in a small team) and the individual drive of the members of the team.

Joining a startup at the ripe age of 22 was one of the best decisions that I have thus far made for myself.

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If you’re looking for habits to optimise your time and maximise your productivity, this isn’t for you. Don’t get me wrong some of these habits do save me time and energy and help me work more efficiently, but my intention with this is to adopt certain habits that make me the person that others want to work with.

In today’s issue:

• Why it’s so important to build good habits at work

• The habits that have made the biggest difference

• How I habit stack

• The idea of building habits around what kind of employee you are

Why it’s so important to build good habits at work

There’s a lot that goes on at work: you might be making decisions, managing people, processing information, navigating dynamics that require a lot of attention. You’re probably receiving a plethora of emails in your inbox throughout the day and feel like your to-do list is never ending (which, I hate to break it to ya, it probably isn’t if you’re planning to continue on working).

The habits I have started to implement reduce the number of decisions I feel that I have to consciously make, which frees up that attention for the things that actually need it. When following up with people, spending 10 minutes preparing for a meeting, or writing down my priorities for the day is automatic, I don’t spend energy thinking about whether I should do it, when or how. Instead, I get to spend that energy on more cognitively-demanding tasks which require deep focus.

I’ve also noticed the way that some of these habits have started to impact me as a professional. I’m embodying professionalism — I’m reliable, competent, intentional in what I do, I’m more engaged. I’m starting to become the things that make you a valuable team player and leader. Someone people want to work with.

The habits that have made the biggest difference

1. I write things down immediately, not “later”

My instinct, when something comes up in a meeting or a conversation or in the middle of doing something else entirely, is to think: I’ll remember that. And sometimes I do. But more often, I don’t, or I remember a version of it, vague or incomplete, by the time I actually sit down to act on it.

Now, I write things down the moment they occur to me: a task that came up in passing, a question I want to ask, something I noticed that might matter later, an idea that arrived while I was doing something unrelated. It doesn’t have to be organised or polished. A note on my phone, a line in a notebook, a voice memo on a walk — the format doesn’t matter. What matters is getting it out of my head and somewhere I can find it.

Nothing gets lost and I’m not spending mental energy trying to hold things (even if I think that I won’t). I also won’t have to chase anyone down to remind me. Plus, the physical act of writing something down, I’ve found, also tends to clarify it.

2. I follow up without being asked

I’ve learned that the ability to follow up without being chased down by your colleagues is one of the fastest ways to build a reputation as someone who can be trusted with responsibility.

It’s being proactive and reliable.

If I’ve said I’ll do something, I track it. If I’m waiting on someone else for something, I set a reminder to follow up if I haven’t heard back. If a task is bigger than I can complete in one sitting, I send a quick note at the checkpoint so the person who assigned it knows where things stand.

3. I prepare for meetings before I’m in them (probably a bit too much…)

Sometimes the amount of preparation I do for meetings feels like overkill.

Before any meeting, I spend at least ten minutes beforehand asking myself two questions. What is this meeting actually trying to decide or achieve? And what’s the one thing I want to have contributed by the time it ends?

I write down the intention behind me being in the meeting in my notebook, and I note bullet points, questions — anything that I’ll want to contribute.

This is also a good exercise to make sure I’m not attending any meetings I don’t actually need to be in. Because the truth is if you don’t know why you’re in a meeting, you probably shouldn’t be there.

4. I ask better questions

Admittedly, asking good questions is something I pride myself in so this isn’t that hard for me to stick to. Still, I practise the art (yes, it’s an art) of asking good questions on a daily basis.

I’ve noticed that the people who tend to stand out in professional environments are not the ones who already know everything; the ones that stand out are the ones who ask the questions that move a conversation forward, that surface what nobody else has said out loud yet, that demonstrate they’ve been paying attention and are engaged.

The habit is less about asking more questions and more about asking better ones. Not “can you explain that?” but “what would need to be true for this to work?” Not “what should I do?” but “here’s what I’m thinking — does that make sense?” It’s a small shift in framing, but it signals that you’re thinking, not just waiting for instructions.

5. I (try to) record every meeting

Recording meetings really is a game changer, and has saved me so much time and effort. Before any work meeting, I ask whoever’s on the call whether it is ok for me to record the meeting. The answer is usually yes (and if it’s a no, well that’s that, at least I asked).

The main reason this has saved me is because recorded meetings come with a transcript and when I need to remember something that was said or if there were things that I didn’t quite understand during the meeting I can go back through the transcript and break it down.

How I habit stack at work

Habit stacking means attaching a new behaviour to something you already do automatically, so it piggybacks on an existing routine rather than requiring its own momentum. Here’s a few examples:

After I sit down at my desk, I write out my three priorities for the day.

After a meeting ends, I spend two minutes writing up what I need to action.

After I’ve completed my last task for the day, I register my client hours.

Small additions to things that were already happening, which means they’re far more likely to stick than habits that require carving out time from scratch.

Build Habits Around Who You Actually Are

One of the most important things I’ve learned about habits, from James Clear’s Atomic Habits and from my own experience trying and failing to sustain routines that weren’t built for my actual life, is that the habits most likely to stick are the ones that align with the person you actually am.

In the context of work, I try to align some of those habits I listed above with the kind of employee that I am and the way I work best. When do I have the most energy in a working day? When am I most likely to let things slide, and why? What part of my work week consistently feels most chaotic, and what would make it slightly less so?

I know that my mornings are when I do my best thinking, so that’s when I protect time for anything that requires focus. I get to the office just before 9am, make myself a coffee and get stuck in. I also know that I need to physically write tasks down (asap!) or they’ll disappear, where to, I don’t know. And finally, I know that I’m more likely to prepare for a meeting if I block 10 minutes in my calendar the day before or the morning of rather than relying on the discipline to do it in the moment.

Let me know in the comments what habits you’re practicing at work to become the person who you’d want to work with.

In an attempt to learn more about the corporate world, how to navigate it and achieve success in my career, I’m challenging myself to more intentionally consume content about these things, things we aren’t necessarily taught in school — when to ask for a salary increase, how to prepare for a performance review and what to do to lead a work meeting with clarity and confidence. By “intentionally” I mean deliberately reaching for content that teaches me something and forces me to engage (probably long-form) rather than just consuming whatever the algorithm serves me next.

The goal is twofold: first, to continue to educate myself about these things so that I feel more confident as I navigate my career, and second, to help close the gap between what we’re taught at university (especially for those of us who studied social sciences and humanities-related subjects and have no idea where to even begin) and the reality that is the workforce, industry, corporate culture, professionalism.

My top reads, watches and listens I’ve chosen to include from the month of April don’t exclusively fall in the how to category. Some of it is commentary. Some of it is opinion. Some of it just made me think about something I hadn’t thought about before — which, as far as I’m concerned, qualifies.

1. How to Ask for What You Want (and Actually Get It) Without Feeling Like a Bitch by Working Hard with Grace Beverley

I’ve been an avid follower of Grace Beverley’s Working Hard podcast for a while now. Every Monday morning I look forward to listening to her newest episode on my way to work. Grace Beverley has a way of asking the questions you really want answered, and she’s great at turning theoretical ideas into practical actions that are both specific and manageable.

This episode, featuring therapist Terri Cole, does exactly that.

The question it’s really trying to answer is: why is asking for things so uncomfortable — particularly for women — and what do we actually do about it? Not in a self-help, feel-your-feelings way, but practically. The psychology behind it. The scripts. The reframes.

What stayed with me was a distinction Grace and Terri draw between asking from a place of desperation versus asking from a place of clarity. When you’re desperate, your ask tends to over-explain, apologise and leave too much room for a no. When you’re clear, you know what you’re asking for and why it’s reasonable, the whole energy of the conversation changes.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own work and life. How many times have I softened a request until it was barely a request at all? How many times have I said “I was just wondering if maybe...” when what I actually meant was “I would like…”

Grace Beverley helpfully provides 5 practical steps to help you ask for what you want:

1. Audit your language

2. Practice “I” statements

3. Give yourself permission

4. Don’t try to justify everything

5. Anchor your ask to a “why”

I’m auditing my language and practicing the art of being more assertive (which I’m finding a bit uncomfortable if I’m being honest!) by getting rid of the “sorry”, the “I hope you don’t mind”, even the smiley face emoji which I use way too often.

If you’ve ever over-apologised in a professional setting before you’ve even said what you want, this one’s for you.

2. Who Are the Creative Directors Most Likely to Embrace AI? by Vogue

In early April I was chatting with a colleague of mine whose daughter works in the creative industry as a graphic designer. She was telling me that her daughter is grappling with the issue of how to maintain creative discipline while also accepting the reality that AI is becoming embedded in almost every industry, including the creative one. She doesn’t want to completely reject AI and then fall behind — especially when it can save her time on certain projects — but she doesn’t want it to replace her passion for creating either. When your professional identity is tied to the act of making things how do you make use of and embrace AI?

This Vogue piece, written by Amy O’Brien, addresses tis question in some sorts from a fashion and creative direction standpoint: which creative directors are leaning into AI, and what separates them from those who are resisting it? What it surfaces is something more interesting than a simple “for or against” debate. The directors most willing to work with AI, Amy O’Brien suggests, tend to be the ones whose sense of creative identity is secure enough not to feel threatened by a new tool. They’re curious rather than defensive.

I found this reframe useful not just for thinking about creative work, but for thinking about AI in any profession. The insecurity isn’t about the technology. It’s about whether you know what’s irreplaceable about what you do. And the problem is that for most people there’s still a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to the role of AI in the workplace.

3. To the woman who always knew she was meant for a bigger life by Diary of a High Achiever

I had to include a piece from Diary of a High Achiever, one of my favourite Substack publications.

In To the woman who always knew she was meant for a bigger life, Sensi Charlery writes about the indescribable feeling she’s carried since she was young that she was meant for something more, the years she spent chasing markers of success that looked right on paper but felt wrong, and the long, uncomfortable process of finally understanding what was actually holding her back. (Spoiler: it was her own sense of identity, not her ability.)

What landed with me was this idea of having ambition without direction: that the drive is real (you’re sure of it, you know it), but if your sense of self doesn’t keep up with what you’re building towards, you’ll keep self-sabotaging right at the moment things start to work.

I found comfort in her honesty about what it feels like to be ambitious and directionless at the same time. That combination of mixed feelings that you know, rationally, should not go together is something I think a lot of us in our early 20s know well and don’t always have the language for.

5. I’m quitting my job to take an adult gap year by Julia Fei

I’ve been following Julia Fei’s “work-life diaries” on YouTube for a few months now, and I’ve come to appreciate the way that she is able to find that sweet spot between working, studying, staying fit, keeping up with friends and family, and even dating. Julia exudes a kind of calm that is difficult to come by in the hustle and bustle of corporate life.

In this recent video, Julia shares with her audience a big life update: she’s leaving her job to take what she’s calling an adult gap year.

As I watched the video, I felt a certain respect for the clarity of her decision. She’s not leaving because she’s burned out, or because work is terrible, or because she’s given up on having a career. She’s leaving because she made a deliberate decision about what she wants from the next chapter, and she’s backing herself to navigate it. She knows what she’s stepping away from she’s learning to let things go. She’s letting go of her 9-5 so that she can have more room and energy to do other things she wants to invest in. My takeaway is this: that at different moments in your life different things will be a priority. And that is ok.

6. Simple Sabotage Field Manual by the CIA / OSS (1944)

Possibly the most unexpected and amusing item on this list.

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was written by the OSS, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, in 1944, as a guide for training ordinary citizens in occupied territories to disrupt enemy operations from the inside. Not through explosives or covert missions, but through small, deliberate acts of sabotage: slowing down decisions, creating bureaucratic bottlenecks, praising the wrong people, and referring everything to committees for “further study and consideration.”

It is, if you strip away the wartime context, an extraordinarily accurate description of how large organisations fail. The manual advises saboteurs to hold as many meetings as possible, insist on proper channels for every decision, bring up irrelevant issues at every opportunity and never give a clear order when a vague one will do. If that sounds familiar, that’s the point. The manual works because it doesn’t require anyone to do anything dramatically wrong — only to do ordinary things slightly worse than they could.

What I took from it, less grimly, was a useful inversion: if you want to understand what good leadership and effective communication look like, read what their deliberate opposites would be. Being decisive, keeping meetings small, giving clear direction, rewarding the right people — none of that is revolutionary. But the fact that a spy manual from 1944 reads like a diagnosis of workplace dysfunction in 2026 suggests it might be harder than it sounds.

Genuinely one of the most interesting things I’ve read this year.

P.S. I linked the original manual but here’s a summary with a few takeaways if you’d rather not read the full version: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage/

That’s all for this month. If any of these resonate, I’d love to hear what you took from them. And if you've been consuming something that's changed how you think about work, your career, or just the world in general lately, do send it my way.

I started to ponder this question since a colleague and dear friend of mine, of a similar age and demographic, recently left. There wasn’t any bad blood. He didn’t hate his job and wasn’t planning on leaving until he was approached by a bigger company and offered a job which aligned better with his skillset and his interests. He has different ambitions than I do and we were in different roles. But I looked up to him, his drive and hunger to do great things in this industry. And his leaving has nonetheless planted this question in my mind.

At the same time I’ve been grappling with the end of my relationship over the last couple of months. As I’ve slowly been coming to terms with and accepting the end of that chapter I’m starting to feel that I might not have wanted to be with that person forever in fear of missing out on something else, on the alternative. Maybe I’m telling myself that to as consolation. And I guess if it was the right person I wouldn’t be worried about that anyway. In a similar vein, I’m afraid to spend my entire 20s in one physical location. What if I don’t explore the world enough so that I can make the best decision – the right decision – about where I want to live one day, settle down if you will (I don’t like the phrase “settle down” but I’m using it here for sake of simplicity). What if I don’t explore the world enough while I’m young and still have energy?

At 21, fresh out of university, I started my first full-time role as a junior analyst at the company I’m now working. I was lucky to have found a job that I love in an organisation that I want to go see succeed. I’ve had an incredible experience from both a work and a learning perspective. No, I don’t have anything else to compare it to but based on conversations I’ve had with friends and family I think I have it pretty good compared to many others in my age group. And so I shrug, I agree, who am I to say otherwise when I don’t know otherwise?

I am told that when you’re at the start of your career it’s good to try out different companies and different roles. Now’s the time to experiment, try new things, things you might not be able to do when you eventually have “real” responsibilities.

But don’t hop between jobs too frequently, they warn me. It’ll send alarm bells ringing in the mind of your potential future employer, concerned that you weren’t able to hold down a job long enough; you’ll have to explain to them that you were “exploring your options”, that you were and are still young, you want to try new things, you don’t want to miss out. But is that credible? Are you reliable? How will they know that you won’t leave 3 months from now? Not to mention that right now the job market isn’t the most welcoming to young professionals. Which means that if I did decide to leave I’d want to make sure I had a job lined up. I don’t think I’m brave (or stupid?) enough to jump ship with no plan.

I am told that you should leave when you’ve reached the top: when you’ve been promoted to a senior management position, leading your own team, when you’ve finally closed that massive contract. I’m not there yet.

I am told that you should leave when you feel that you’ve gotten everything out of the organisation in terms of professional and personal development. When there’s nothing more for you to learn, and you’re now on a plateau. I’m not there yet. I still think there’s a lot for me to learn and growth to occur, though that margin has probably shrunk since I first started.

I am told that you’ll just know. You’ll feel it in your gut. That it’s time for you to try something different and pursue an adventure elsewhere.

It’s rare to find someone who has had the “perfect” balance between staying in a job long enough that it isn’t deemed problematic by employers and jumping around enough that you get to experience a range of roles and organisations. It must be a difficult thing to do. Or maybe some people aren’t concerned about that the way I am. The boy whom I’m trying my hardest to move on from and let go of, is a resident doctor. His entire career is laid out for him. But his personality is in complete juxtaposition to the fixed and planned nature of his career path. I wonder if those two things will clash at one point, that he’ll want out, crave to something else, or maybe, at the age of 50 he’ll be regretful. Maybe he’ll wish that he had tried out other things. Or, on the other hand, maybe he will do lots of things, alongside his medical career which is probably the most likely scenario knowing his vivacious and ambitious demeanour.

The fear of staying in a job, a relationship, a place is rooted is something far more existential I think. I’m scared of limiting myself to one thing, one person or one place. What if there’s something more for me to experience, something bigger that I could be contributing to which I’m not? I’m scared of becoming complacent because I’m comfortable in my role and the environment in which I’m working. What if I can’t make the leap when I finally decide that it’s time? I guess it’s FOMO in a way, or maybe just commitment issues (or maybe that’s what commitment issues is? FOMO?). Perhaps this sort of thinking comes from a place of comparison. The reason I started thinking about this in the first place was because I witnessed someone with a similar ‘professional’ profile to me, jump ship. And yet I know that we did do different work, we are different people and we have different interests, ambitions. We recently caught up over a coffee and a croissant. He reminded me to continue to keep my doors open, network and speak to people in different roles and organisations even as I continue to show up and work hard where I am. Say yes to opportunities and make sure you aren’t limiting yourself to the people and the opportunities in the company.

So I started a list in my Notes app on my phone of potential companies I’d be interested in working for. I’ve decided to attend more events, get back into networking which I find to be a challenging scene. And I’m focusing on two things: optionality and energy.

I guess, to conclude, there’s probably no right or wrong answer to this question. You could in theory get a mix of experience by doing different jobs within the same company. Some will find what it is that they love and want to do early on and others will try a multitude of different types of work during their lifetime. Right now, I think there are 3 big things that are important to me career-wise and they might help you decide whether or not it’s time to leave a job including:

1. Learning – are you still learning, growing developing both as a person and a professional?

2. Optionality – is this role opening doors for me or narrowing them?

3. Energy – does this role still energise me or is it draining me?

I know deep down that I won’t stay here forever, but I don’t want to prolong my stay. And anyway, the company might not last. It could go bankrupt, or be acquired by some larger company in which case there could be a risk of my role becoming redundant. There are so many factors outside of my control which contribute to me having a job every the morning. Still, having those 3 things in mind gives me a sense of control. If the answers to 1, 2, or 3 of those things is a negative I know to reflect and reconsider my options.

I realise that I’m in a privileged position: I’m afraid of leaving a job which has offered me so much and to which I have provided immense value (if I do say so myself), too soon. I’m not complaining by any means of the term and I don’t plan on leaving any time soon, at least I don’t think so. And yet I can’t help but wonder if everything is going well, how do I know when it’s time to leave?

Photo credits: Unsplash

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In today’s issue:

• Why you should (and need) to act like a director

• Why I don’t use AI to write my essays

• 3 different ways that I use AI to help me write better essays

• An example

When you use AI, you are a director

In 2025, an LSE professor gave his students a peculiar assignment: use AI to write your essay. Their task was to generate the best possible response to the prompt. Rather than being assessed on the clarity or persuasiveness of their arguments, the students were graded on how effectively they prompted the model and how well they identified and critiqued its shortcomings. One of these students, Valeria Schell, explained in an article for The Times that the exercise forced her to “think like a director, not just a writer - to probe, question, and ultimately expose the limitations of the tools that will probably only grow in their daily importance.” I like this way of thinking about AI – as ‘someone’ who is part of your team, ‘someone’ that you are managing, delegating tasks to, things you know they can do better than you can. You aren’t replacing your own thinking but together you’re stronger. For this kind of partnership to work, you, as the “boss” or the “director” have to know how to direct AI, and guide and prompt it in such a way that it does what you want and does it well.

I like to think about it in this way: if my boss gives me somewhat ambiguous instructions for a task, and I don’t actively seek clarification, I will probably deliver an output that isn’t exactly aligned to what he had in mind. That then results in (a) bad output or (b) some kind of back and forth between the two of us until I have fully understood the assignment and only then can produce exactly what it is he was looking for in the first place. The same rules apply to AI: if you aren’t specific or clear in what you’re asking of it it probably won’t spit out exactly what you’re wanting. I think is one of the most basic and fundamental rule when it comes to using AI and yet because we weren’t taught how to probe and question at school we find this a difficult thing to do.

Why I don’t use AI to write my essays

I don’t use AI to actually write my essays for me. I don’t use it to replace the creation of my own arguments and the way that I choose to situate them in the broader literature on the topic. While AI could write my 4000-word essay in 30 seconds, it probably won’t be very good. I, like you, can tell when someone has used AI to write an email or a newsletter, and an academic paper is no different (in fact I would argue it’s actually a lot easier to tell when someone has used AI to write a paper versus an email due to the nature of academic writing which would require a series of prompts that most people wouldn’t know how to engineer).

The second reason I don’t use AI to write my essays is that doing so doesn’t support or strengthen my thinking. It replaces it, which defeats the purpose of me going to university (at least the learning and education part of it). Also, as Craig Perry suggests, when you let AI to think on your behalf, you’re effectively allow a machine to shape your perspective of the world – whether you like it or not. And that’s a troubling thought because who are we if not our ability to think, judge, create, interpret? Who are we if not our opinions and unique interpretations of the world?

I’m not ready to outsource my thinking to a machine just yet. I fear that if I do and the day comes that I will need to think on my own, whether that’s during a Q&A session at the end of a work presentation, during an ideation workshop with my boss or even at dinner debating politics with my friends that I won’t be able to do it. And if I can’t do those things I might as well not be in the room.

So no, I’m not using AI to write my essay. Not yet, at least. Instead, here are 3 ways that I use AI and chatbots to help me write my academic essays that aren’t doing the actual writing for me.

3 ways I used AI to help me write better essays

I’m certainly not passing up on a tool that can help me produce a better piece of work in (at least) half the amount of time. AI helps me produce better outputs, amplify my thinking and ability to ideate, debate and articulate. It does things on my behalf so that I have more space to do the more time-consuming thinking and creating that makes for a good essay.

1. Learning and breaking things down

AI is good at breaking down concepts, ideas, definitions. It can level with your understanding (or lack thereof) and help to increase it. At the beginning of any essay you should be defining your key terms and in order to do that well you need a strong grasp on what those terms mean. I’ll ask it to define terms I don’t fully understand, clarify the difference between concepts or identify the big pieces of literature within which those concepts were first written about.

In a similar vein, AI can be used to learn about the different sides of the debate and the literature on the topic. It helps me answer early questions like:

• “What are the dominant perspectives on this issue?”

• “Where do scholars disagree?”

• “What assumptions underpin each side?”

Academic writing isn’t neutral. Your interpretation of evidence is shaped by your background, values and assumptions, and sometimes you might be asked to be explicit about these things, sometimes not. Regardless, AI can actually help you surface this if you use it deliberately. For example, ask it to:

• Identify implicit assumptions in a draft argument

• Highlight where your framing might reflect a particular theoretical lens

• Suggest alternative interpretations of the same evidence

2. Red Teaming

One of my favourite ways to use AI in essay-writing is to stress-test my ideas and arguments ruthlessly (and I mean ruthlessly). I didn’t really do this before I had AI, not even with a real person. Rarely did I aggressively get another person to tear apart my argument, present the counter argument, the flaws and limitations. It’s uncomfortable, sure, and it requires additional thinking to identify a rebuttal or a more precise and less absolute argument supported by stronger evidence. But that’s also how you ensure that your argument is strong and a strong argument makes for a strong essay.

Direct AI to:

• Act as a critic from an opposing school of thought

• Identify the weakest assumptions in your reasoning

• Point out logical gaps, overgeneralisation, or missing evidence

• Construct the strongest possible counterargument

Like I said, the key is to be ruthless with it. Don’t ask “is this good?” Ask:

• “Why is this argument flawed?”

• “What would be the counter argument to this statement?”

• “Where would this argument fall apart under scrutiny?”

I think the reason I love using AI to red team so much is because it doesn’t feel as personal as if you were to do it with an actual person. You’re literally doing it with a machine. There’s no feelings involved. You have nothing to lose. Not even your sense of pride.

3. Low-complexity tasks

One of the biggest benefits of AI is that it can take over the parts of academic work that don’t require a heavy lift in terms of cognition. It can do the parts that really should be automated.

This includes:

• Formatting references or structuring sections

• Summarising articles into key points

• Extracting themes across multiple readings

• Turning rough notes into a clean outline

These kinds of tasks are necessary in academic work, but they don’t require a huge amount of reasoning, judgment or thought. In other words, the cognitive load is low. By delegating these tasks, you free up mental bandwidth for what requires more deliberate thinking like creating an original thesis or analysing evidence in support of an argument – the things that make for good academic writing.

An example

Let’s take the following essay prompt:

“Compare and contrast realism and liberalism in their approaches to conflict resolution.”

The first thing I need to do is make sure I actually understand what’s being asked. That starts with getting clear on the core concepts: realism and liberalism. The prompt already implies that there are both similarities and differences between these two schools of thought, specifically in how they approach conflict resolution, so my job is to unpack both sides of that comparison.

Understanding this properly is important because I’ll need to define both concepts clearly at the start of the essay. I also want to understand the literature that exists in terms of what has been written about realism and liberalism theory in conflict resolution, respectively and then together.

At this stage, I’m not trying to write anything yet. I’m trying to build understanding.

It has given me the core idea, assumptions and the key proponents of the concept in the literature. A good start point.

Let’s say I have lecture notes on realism that are quite messy or overly detailed. Instead of rereading everything multiple times, I can use AI to synthesise those notes into something clearer and more structured. In this case, I’m deliberately delegating a lower-order cognitive task so I can focus on understanding the content rather than organising it.

For example, I might ask: “can you summarise these notes into the key principles of realism in international relations, and explain them in simple terms?”

This gives me a cleaner foundation to work from without losing the substance of the lecture.

Once I have my core thesis and my supporting arguments evidenced with examples and literature, I’ll move on to red teaming.

My thesis is:

While realism provides a more accurate explanation of the causes of conflict, liberalism offers more practical and sustainable solutions for conflict resolution.

My supporting arguments are:

• Argument 1: Realism emphasises power and self-interest, which explains why conflicts arise but limits its ability to resolve them;

• Argument 2: Liberalism focuses on cooperation, institutions, and interdependence, offering more viable pathways to resolution;

• Argument 3: A combined approach may provide the most effective framework, acknowledging both power dynamics and cooperative mechanisms.

At this point, I’m using AI to stress-test, or red team, my ideas.

For example:

• “Here is my thesis and my three main arguments. What are the strongest counterarguments to this position?”

• “Where is my reasoning weak or incomplete?”

• “How would a realist scholar respond to this essay?”

Red teaming with AI forces me to confront gaps in my thinking. It also helps me strengthen my argument before I even start writing, because I’ve already engaged with potential criticisms.

At no point here is AI doing the thinking for me. Instead, it’s helping me:

• organise information

• clarify concepts

• and challenge my ideas

It’s easy to ask AI to write your essay for you. But it’s also easy to tell when something has been written by AI and so I don’t use it to do the thinking for me. I use it to support my thinking and give me more space for it. My favourite ways to use AI to write better are by breaking down ideas and concepts for my own learning and ideation, delegating low-complexity tasks and red teaming my arguments.

Image credits: Canva

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