What factors do you weigh when mulling a job change? A better salary? Greater work-life balance? A fancier title or more direct reports?
Google’s Yulie Kwon Kim always had one other key consideration before making any job switches.
“Every change that I made was not about ‘what is the next big job?’, but ‘what is the next thing I want to learn?'” Kim told Business Insider. “It’s kind of funny because in many ways I have this big job, but I never was looking for how do I get a bigger role or a title.”
Today, Kim is the VP of Product at Google Workspace, the office-software suite that includes products like Gmail, Meet, Drive, Docs. She’s also previously worked at companies like eBay and Facebook.
Her tenure at eBay concluded in 2010, around the time of the mobile app boom in Silicon Valley. It was a period when VCs were investing heavily in apps like Uber and Airbnb and when everyone in tech wanted to learn about building mobile apps, she said. So, she decided to take a leap and follow suit.
Kim says, after a few years working at scrappy startups, she decided she wanted the chance to gain work experience a bigger company. “What I wanted to learn next as a product leader was: How do you build for very large-scale businesses and products? Because it’s a different muscle.”
That led her to product management at Facebook, and ultimately her current role at Google.
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At the end of the day, “careers are really a long game,” she said. That means it’s important to not just take the opportunity that looks the most “shiny” or high-profile, said Kim.
“A lot of times careers are built on lateral moves,” said Kim. “Often the way that you grow is by gaining a lot of really rich experience and that arms you with more skills, more relationships, more things that help you in the long run.”
Focusing on learning is “probably more relevant than ever” today as AI transforms many industries, she added.
“That is probably the most powerful thing you can do for yourself, especially in this era where there’s so much change and new technology, and the pace of progress is so fast,” she said. “To keep up with it, you need to really be a learner.”
