The Secret to Midcareer Success - WSJ

Great commentary on the importance of businesses to cultivate mid-career employees for continued & sustained success. Some pearls of wisdom are:

- Most em­ploy­ers mis­tak­enly nur­ture pri­mary skills at the ex­pense of sec­ondary ones. This is es­pe­cially true for em­ploy­ees who are highly pro­duc­tive… Un­less they move into man­age­ment or men­tor­ship roles, they can be­come a drag on em­ploy­ers.
- When you move from the field in which you built your ca­reer and step into lead­er­ship, your tech­ni­cal tal­ent be­comes less im­por­tant, and data be­comes just an­other tool.
- Lead­er­ship skills won’t de­velop on their own—they must be ac­tively cul­ti­vated.
- Stu­dents who are pre­paring to en­ter tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tific fields should pur­sue a well-rounded ed­u­ca­tion, in­clud­ing the lib­eral arts.
- The sec­ondary skills that will help them suc­ceed in mid­ca­reer are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from the pri­mary ones that brought them suc­cess in the early days.
- You have to learn now enough to ask in­tel­li­gent ques­tions, not find the an­swers your­self.
- A medi­ocre tech­nol­o­gist who is open to learn­ing can be­come a great cor­po­rate ex­ec­u­tive, while a su­per­star sci­en­tist can turn out to be a lousy boss.
- Skills like cod­ing and ac­count­ing cre­ate value in an ad­di­tive way. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and lead­er­ship skills are mul­ti­plica-tive—they help make the whole team more valu­able.