There should be a Yelp for career decisions. There isn't.
Five stars: Took the promotion. Would absolutely do again.
Four stars: Changed industries. Rocky start, solid outcome.
One star: "Follow your passion." Passion did not cover rent.
No such site exists, so we piece one together ourselves. Rankings. Reddit threads. LinkedIn posts. Salary reports. Alumni panels. Friends who insist business school changed their lives, and others who swear they learned more on the job.
None of them are wrong. They're just reviews of someone else's future.
As we prepared for this year's Forté Forums, I expected to spend most of my time thinking about MBA programs. Instead, I found myself thinking about something I've been writing about throughout this entire series.
Signals. Imagine that.
A few months ago, I wrote that signs tell us what organizations say, while signals help us understand what organizations are actually likely to do. Job descriptions are signs. Who gets hired is a signal. Company values are signs. Who gets rewarded is a signal. And I pointed out that it goes both ways. Organizations are interpreting our signs just like we are interpreting theirs.
That framework has helped me make sense of how organizations work.
What I hadn't appreciated was that we rely on signals for something much more personal.
We use them to make decisions about our own futures.
When certainty isn't available, and in careers it rarely is, we start collecting clues. We pay attention to people whose careers we admire, ask mentors what they would do, linger after a presentation to ask one more question, or schedule coffee with someone whose path looks interesting. Little by little, we assemble a picture of what the future might hold.
We're not looking for answers. We're looking for signals.
That's true of the people we meet at Forté Forums. A few are seniors in college, just graduated. Most are already in the workforce. Some want to accelerate. Some want to pivot into a different industry or function. Some are trying to figure out how to earn more over the course of a career, how to become harder to replace in a world shaped by AI, or whether graduate school is even worth considering anymore.
The questions are all asking: what's the best next move?
It's an impossible question, because there's no review site that can tell you whether your decision will turn out to be the right one five years from now. Which is, I suppose, the whole problem with wanting Yelp for this in the first place. Yelp works because thousands of people already ate at the restaurant. Nobody has lived your career yet. Not even the people whose reviews you're reading. Not even you.
I've spent a lot of my career thinking about what happens after people enter the workforce. How organizations make talent decisions. How professionals navigate them. Why wasn't I promoted. What do employers actually value. How do I earn more influence.
Those are all questions about reading the signals other people and organizations send.
Nobody has lived your career yet. Not even the people whose reviews you're reading. Not even you.”
What I hadn't stopped to examine was where those signals come from in the first place. Throughout this series, I've explored how to recognize the signals organizations send and the signals we send back. I still think that's invaluable in career management.
What I hadn't appreciated was that all of that assumes we're already working with good information.
What if the more important question is: Where do better signals come from?
I think the answer is exposure.
We make better career decisions when we deliberately expose ourselves to better information. We put ourselves in rooms we weren't sure we belonged in. We have conversations with people whose experiences are different from our own. We ask questions before we need the answers. We discover opportunities we didn't know existed, not because someone persuaded us to take them, but because we finally had enough information to see them as possibilities.
That's the underrated skill. Not making better decisions. Increasing the quality of the information you have before you make one.
That's why conferences matter. Mentors matter. Conversations matter. Forums matter. Not because any one of them is more reliable than a Reddit thread. Because you're in the room, forming your own read, instead of inheriting someone else's.
We can't Yelp our way through a career.
Maybe the best we can do is get better at finding signals worth trusting, and worse at pretending we already know which ones those are.
