Career Advice For Millennials From A Former CEO

When millennials look for career advice they often want to know what type of industry or education to pursue so they can suss out the most secure career-path. Maybe you’ve heard that computer science is the best return-on-educational-investment, or maybe you’ve even read our list of the fastest-growing careers for young people. But regardless of industry, there’s far more general advice for millennials that’s just as important.

Speaking with the TED blog ahead of her recent hosting duties at the organization’s Boston Consultant Group conference, serial CEO Margaret Heffernan doled out some tips for millennials entering or just establishing themselves in the workspace that apply equally to careers from freelance writing to mechanical engineering and everything in between. Heffernan, who worked for years at BBC before heading up companies like iCast Corporation and Marlin Gas Trading Ltd., has several pieces of advice for working millennials, but many of her tips revolve around 21st century networking considerations. And in particular, she highlights that millennials should rely on their coworkers as a support cast in order to better themselves. “Social capital is a form of mutual reliance, dependency and trust,” she says. “It hugely changes what people can do…It’s impossible in modern organizations to know everything that you need to know. What you need are lots of people who know lots of different things. Collectively you’re smarter.” Instead, Heffernan suggests, many contemporary workspaces are problematically isolationist, and the millennial generation—often described sweepingly as self-involved—could stand to lean on our coworkers more openly. (So, for example, ask a coworker every now and then instead of just Googling.)

Heffernan also shrugs off a prevailing view about millennials that we’re special—for reasons good or bad. “We talk about millennials in a language of exceptionalism,” she offers. But she also admits that our generation tends toward a specifically modern approach to overwork. “We think that if we work through the night, we’re being very clever. We’re not. We think we can work long hours — month after month, year after year — and that there won’t be any wear and tear. But there is.” In this way, many of Heffernan’s suggestions aren’t millennial specific, and while her parting words function as familiarly universal life advice, there’s a reason we hear the adage at high-school and college graduations. “Think for yourself. Think for yourself. Think for yourself,” she says. “I’m really concerned that many of major institutions don’t want people to think for themselves. My advice to any young person starting out is: don’t be a sheep. It’s your life and your decisions, and you can’t blame other people if you make the wrong choice. It’s your choice.”