The Most Successful People Rely on a Career Operating System – Here’s How to Develop Your Own

Everyone always wants to know the secrets of successful people. Are they more skilled, smarter, or luckier than the rest of us? Even more maddening, when asked, they may not even know exactly what led to their career success, leaving the rest of us in the dark. 

The good news is, I’ve spent the past 12 years studying what makes career-driven individuals successful and have found that there is something that sets high-performers apart—and it’s something that anyone can develop. The people who are best at advancing through their career have developed a well-functioning career operating system (cOS), which is an infrastructure of habits that support effective career growth.

Just like your phone, tablet, or computer is powered by an operating system, so is your career. Your cOS consists of the underlying mindsets and practices that allow all your professional “apps” (i.e., your hard and soft skills, capabilities, and experiences) to work most effectively: things like the ability to spot opportunities that align with your ambitions, communicate what you’ve achieved, build smart relationships, and find the resources to make your goals a reality. 

Let’s take a look at a successful cOS in action: Sarah started a summer internship at a tech company, and was gunning for a competitive full-time offer. Not only did she take the time to intentionally plan this career goal, she communicated it to her manager at the start of the internship, asking what she could do (in addition to doing great work) to best position herself to get hired. Together, they came up with three practices that Sarah would integrate throughout the summer: a monthly meeting with an executive sponsor to get her exposure to decision makers, a weekly update of her work that Sarah would share in the team Slack channel, and a weekly progress meeting with her manager to check in and iterate on their plan. At the end of the summer, two out of the 25 interns got full-time offers—and Sarah was one of them.  

Other interns may have been just as skilled as Sarah, but they didn’t have the operating system to bring those skills together into an intentional and successful career move. Plus, with her CoS already set up and operating in the background, Sarah could focus less energy on figuring out how to succeed and more energy actually doing great work. 

While some people are just wired differently and this way of operating comes naturally for them, it is possible to build a strong cOS from scratch. Here are a few steps to getting started—and getting closer to the most successful version of yourself.

Start Building the Programs to Support Your Career Growth

In the long run, your Career Operating System (Career OS) will be a set of practices that you barely have to think about doing to keep your career moving forward. But, like any new habit, you have to be more intentional until it becomes second nature.

The best way to start building your Career OS is to choose a few actions that you feel like, when done consistently, will help you grow. Here are some common buckets these may fall into, with some questions to get you thinking about what practices would work for you: 

• Intentional career planning: How can I keep tabs on where I want to be heading in my career and create good career habits?
• Generous Advocacy How can I regularly tell others (internally and externally) about what I do?
• Curiosity Led Learning: How can I ensure I’m continuously learning and gaining new skills?
• Continuous Relationship building: How can I regularly meet and keep up with people (internal and external) who can help me grow and succeed?
• Organizational acumen: How can I continuously check in with my performance management objectives, and then go further to understand and support company goals and decision makers?
• 360 Awareness – How do I keep track of my interests and also keep an eye on the company and market to identify new experiments and opportunities that can increase my visibility?

Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much at once. (Think how most tech companies start with a version 1.0 of their OS and then keep adding features from there.) To get going, pick something that feels attainable, like one internal habit (e.g., a monthly check-in on your goals, a personal retrospective whenever you finish a big project) and one external habit (e.g., a monthly mentor coffee, a weekly post about your work in the internal chat or on LinkedIn). Put them on your calendar to hold yourself accountable. Then, once those become second nature, you can start to add more. 

Schedule Time for Regular “Updates”

Just like your phone or computer gets a new software update every so often, your career OS is going to need to evolve and improve over time. So build in some regular time—maybe every month or every quarter—to check in with your cOS, find “bugs” to fix, and think big about how you can make it even better. 

I like to sit down about every other month and ask myself: What parts of my Career OS worked for me—and what parts seemed to fail? Are there small tweaks that will make my OS function better? Am I ready to try adding some new “features” (habits) to my Career OS?

The value of this update time is to prevent you from having to constantly be thinking about your career operating system. Instead, you can set it up, let it run for a while in the background to see how things go, and then use your dedicated time for making improvements.

Make It Open Source

Finally, you don’t have to build your career operating system alone. Ask people you admire or who are a little bit ahead of you about what habits have helped them succeed, and try integrating those into your Career OS. Collaborate with people you trust to develop a plan that fits your specific needs—for instance, like Sarah, you might talk to your manager or a mentor about your career aspirations, and work together to brainstorm some habits that could set you up to achieve them. You could even work with a coach to help build your cOS, or start a support group with your peers to regularly reflect on your operating systems and learn from each other. 

It can often feel hard to grasp what it means to “manage your career” successfully, but I hope the Career Operating System framework can give you some clear steps forward towards your vision of success.