Recently I have been asked what career growth means to be? Without hesitation I shared that it’s two things: first, expanding the skill set, and second, advancement in position (at least in the corporate world). In this post, I want to expand my answer and also share a story or two.

In my opinion, skill development is the foundation for other types of growth. Skills make you more capable, adaptable and valuable in your role and industry. Almost all of the soft skills are transferable to new environments. As for technical skills, the majority are also transferable unless they are very specific to the company you work for (*). Something that might not transfer very well could be team- or org-specific knowledge.

Your skills, knowledge, and hard work is something that allows you to increase the scope of responsibility, gain professional recognition, trust, and as a natural consequence you advance in position, make financial progress and hopefully achieve personal fulfillment.

After answering the question, the person I was talking to shared a Chinese Bamboo Tree story (**), where we can compare someone’s growth to how bamboo grows. There is no visible growth for the first 4-5 years, which is because bamboo is expanding its root system and then in one season bamboo grows very rapidly. This is a very strong parable and I have successfully used it at work when a colleague of mine was seeking career advice.

If you stay at the same role, level, or team for quite some time it doesn’t necessarily mean you are not growing, you could be expanding your root system before you get promoted to that next level. As long as you feel you are learning new things, becoming stronger in your skills, expanding your work network, delivering some things you are definitely growing.

To extend on this analogy of plant growth, I was thinking about uprooting: you work for 2-4 years in a company, you made sizable contributions, got your promo, and slowly started to become more and more valuable and then you transplant yourself to another company. What happens to your roots? Do they survive?

I have seen people who were the first “plant” to a field and were able to grow to be the biggest of the plants, I have also seen people who had good roots but stayed in shadows for too long and stagnated, and others who transplanted themselves so often they could not grow enough on each iteration.

I was asking myself, what kind of plant am I? Google is my 5th workplace and I cannot stop wondering what I would have become if I stayed in any of the companies or countries I left behind. Looking back it seems I made the right decisions as I was able to grow to a bigger and well rewarded plant with a very diverse root system, but I have never become a really big one. Maybe I’m yet to see my real growth, who knows.

What kind of plant are you? What are your thoughts?

(*) Some of my fellow Googlers sometimes joke that we become unhirable outside because of the uniqueness of tools we use and the scale of problems we are solving.

(**) Technically bamboo isn’t a tree and belongs to the grass family. Some species of Bamboo might indeed take 5 years to grow underground before emerging above ground but this isn’t universal or common to all species. Additionally I searched for the origins of this story and it doesn’t appear like it exists in Chinese folklore. It appears this parable was popularized by western culture in modern motivational literature.