Why you should focus on skills > salary at the beginning of your career

I remember having a conversation with one of my mentors a few years back before I pivoted out of asset management, and I was scared to make the jump because I would have had to take a 25% pay cut.

He told me a quote I’ll always remember

“Your career is like a marathon; make sure your foundation is strong so you can endure the entire race”

Now he loves to throw in quotes all the time (he has some absolutely horrid ones 🤣), but this one has grown on me the longer I've gone into my career.

Why?

Because I can start to tangibly see the impact of the message behind what he meant.

His message was essentially that I needed to focus less on salary right now and more on building the foundation of my long-term career success - skills.

I knew I wanted to have a career in strategy consulting and needed to naturally start from the beginning and develop my skills, but I didn’t want to earn less money.

While now that was fully understandable, his point was that I had my whole 30+ year career to earn a high salary. But I could only unlock that salary by going through the reps and developing the necessary skills to be a high earner.

There are very few high-earning jobs that don’t require having high-value skills which that takes years of honing and developing.

And more importantly, you can’t cheat the process it takes to develop those high-value skills which will

So focusing on being scared to take the jump to develop those skills - even if it means a average or ‘low’ salary - is only delaying your journey to earning the big bucks down the line.

And looking back now - he was right.

Taking that pay cut to pivot into strategy consulting meant that in under 2 years I was earning 50% more in consulting than I did in my asset management Job.

But I only got to a relatively high paying consulting job by doing the reps of learning those high value skills in my initial role where I took the pay cut. It was those 13 months of learning the key skillset and learning the reps that allowed me to unlock the higher paying Job.

Now this was only over a 2 year period. Imagine that x10 when you focus on compounding those valuable skills early on in your career and how much you can earn down the line.

Just to clarify, wanting to earn a high salary isnt wrong or a bad thing - we should always be ambitious.

So if you’re a graduate or young professional whose loking for that high paying role, just make sure to ask yourself - “Will this role give me the skills to unlock and maintain a high income down the line?”

P.S - I can’t believe 2,000+ of you are reading this newsletter weekly, I really feel like I’m blabbing half the time 🤣