🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

I’ve spent much of my adult career in roles where I was on the younger side what is “typical”: this has led to a range of interesting experiences, learnings and insights.

In this Hacking Academia video, I run through four key concepts relating to the experience of being relatively young for your career stage:

✳ Systems and work culture are not set up for people who are substantially younger than expected

✳ The need to develop an appropriate attitude towards early age success

✳ Burning bright but not burning out

✳ You can’t genuinely fast track cumulative life experience

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Being Ignored Because You’re Too Young
📌 (1:10) Being Young for Your Career Stage
📌 (1:27) Brief Details For Context On My Career
📌 (2:06) Looking Young or Old
📌 (2:31) What I’ve Learnt in My Career to Date
📌 (2:47) Relationship to Other Experiences Outside the Norm
📌 (3:09) These Are Good Challenges to Have!
📌 (3:23) Systems and Work Culture Aren’t Set Up For Unusually Young People
📌 (3:59) Age and Experience Specific Restrictions
📌 (4:45) Assumptions About Your Life Stage
📌 (5:53) Being Disregarded Due to Your Youth
📌 (6:08) Other Assumptions Around Financial Situation
📌 (6:48) Developing an Appropriate Attitude
📌 (7:25) Be Proud of Your Achievements But Know Not Everyone Had That Opportunity
📌 (7:46) Burn Bright But Don’t Burn Out
📌 (8:48) Example: Tracking Cohorts Over Time
📌 (9:12) Handling Plateaus and Setbacks
📌 (9:43) You Can’t Fast-Track Life Experience
📌 (10:22) Life Experience is Supremely Valuable for Most Professions
📌 (11:36) Be Aware of But Not Ashamed About a Lack of Experience
📌 (12:07) Having Fun and Learning About Work Dynamics
📌 (13:00) With a Few Concepts Kept in Mind, Being Young in Your Career is Great!

Full Video Notes

• In my day job at a robotics research centre, I’ve had the opportunity to take hundreds of groups of people from all professions and walks of life on tours of our centre. One of the funniest encounters from these tours was an overseas VIP delegation, who, as was customary, I met at the front door of the centre. There was an agenda for the tour that had been circulated, and they knew they were going to meet a professor and director of the centre. But as soon as I stepped out to meet them, I knew something was wrong – the VIP guests had taken one look at me and then commenced talking within themselves. The translator was busy at work, and from what I was able to piece together, the guests had taken one look at me, assessed that it was implausible that I could be a professor, let alone a centre director, and were trying to work out whether they had been insulted by being palmed off to some junior academic. I found it amusing at the time, but I would note that this would not always be an amusing situation, especially if the person in my position was from a demographic where additional factors mean they are likely to be ignored.
• This anecdote is just one of many I’ve accumulated in the first two decades of my career, and forms the backdrop for this video, which is about the insights and lessons I’ve learned from reaching career milestones, in my case in academia, at a relatively young age. 
• I’m going to try to avoid the trap of turning this into a cringe-worthy, humblebrag type video. My career progression has been on the fast side but by no means has been exceptional – I finished school when I was 16, got my PhD when I was 24, got my first tenure track job at 29, and became a full professor at age 35. Those are on the young side but by no means particularly young – I know plenty of people who reached those milestones at substantially younger ages, and some rare individuals have famously obtained their PhDs in their teenage years, or become full professors in their mid 20s. In my case, being on the younger side was further complicated by sometimes being judged as being up to ten years younger than I actually was, including in media pieces written about our work. Of course I’ve had the opposite occur too – where people think I’m older than I actually am. Sometimes those observations are followed up by an explanation that these guesses were informed by my job title and position. 
• In this journey, I’ve learnt a lot about the experience of being relatively young in a career. Here I want to talk about a few key concepts that I have come to grasp over time, and which are important for navigating this journey, if you are too in a similar situation. Before I get into it, it’s important to note that a lot of these concepts also apply, in varying degrees to experiences that are different to being unusually young, for example, being older than is typical for a role, or being from an under-represented minority. I am going to stick to the case of being young, because that’s the experience I can speak to most authentically. I also need to point out that being relatively young for a certain career stage is a fortunate position to be in, despite some of the challenges, and so this video is by no means meant to construe that this isn’t a good situation to be in.
• The first concept to cover is that systems and work culture are not set up for people who are substantially younger than expected.
• Careers and career ecosystems make a lot of explicit and implicit assumptions about the typical ages of people at certain career stages. These assumptions can be detrimental if you are outside of those typical age ranges, whether on the younger or older side. Again,my experience has been being on the younger side so I’ll talk to that, but the other scenario of being older than is “typical” has affected a lot of people I know as well.
• One example in an academic career is the age specific ranges that are associated with a lot of fellowship type schemes. If you’ve been successful in obtaining a junior fellowship unusually early in your career, upon finishing it and looking for the next fellowship opportunity, you may find that you have not yet “aged into” the middle and senior career fellowship opportunities, that may have either or both of explicit and implied minimum experience or age requirements. In a career where a typical high performer might expect to move from one fellowship to the next, you may find yourself locked out of the system for a few years because you’re not eligible yet to apply for the middle or senior career opportunities.
• But these assumptions can also be detrimental in indirect ways as well. 
• A lot of more senior roles often, implicitly at least, assume that the person doing it is quite senior, and does not have younger person responsibilities, like for example, a family with young kids. Assumptions about meeting times, ability to travel at all times and hours, may not be congruent with playing a meaningful role in your family’s upbringing, or may fall back on old assumptions about there being a partner who can take all that load. If you are unusually young and mixing it up with these more senior folk, you may find yourself in a work social environment where it is assumed everyone is at a similar life stage, where simply you are not. 
• Of course in good environments leaders will do everything they can to dissuade such assumptions, but in terms of systemic attitudes, this is a problematic issue that is likely to persist for quite a while yet. Again, this situation is even worse for people from other underrepresented demographics.
• People may sometimes treat you differently because you are young. One of the negative reactions you may encounter is a dismissive one, where people, by virtue of you being young, assume that you can’t possibly add anything to the conversation.
• Other assumptions related to this could include that you are in a financial situation commensurate with someone who has had a long and prolific career for 30 or 40 years – when you may only be 10 years into your specific career. Assumptions about your financial status and flexibility may be off the mark because of this – you may still be in a career stage where establishing basic financial stability and security is super important, but isn’t really an issue for many of the peers you’re interacting with. That’s not to say all older, more senior people will be financially comfortable – but it will often trend that way.
• The second key concept regards developing an Appropriate Attitude towards Early Age Success
• There is a natural tendency for both the individuals involved and society to make a big deal of reaching a certain career stage at an unusually young age. 
• In academia, this could be getting your PhD early, landing your first tenure-track faculty job early, or reaching full professor early.
• But age isn’t everything, and many people really get their career started later, for a variety of reasons – adversity, raising a family and other responsibilities. 
• Does this mean you shouldn’t be proud of your achievements at an unusually young age, or should try to de-emphasize them completely? No – but you should always be sensitive to the fact that there are many career paths. What you were able to do may simply not have been feasible for many others due to circumstances, often completely beyond their control. 
• A third key concept relates to burning bright but not burning out.
• Reaching career milestones early often comes hand in hand with an unsustainable work ethic. This isn’t exactly surprising – all other things being equal, working especially hard, but smart, is one of the key factors that can drive early career advancement. But too often this unsustainable workload ends, unsurprisingly, in burnout and breakdown. People will often tell themselves, or their families, that after reaching a certain milestone, they’ll slow down, having “made it” so to speak. But what often happens in reality is that, upon reaching that milestone, they immediately spy the next metaphorical mountain to conquer, and they focus entirely on that next milestone, not slowing down at all. This is a vicious cycle to get into, and will eventually damage most people and their relationships. Breaking out of it can take some significant discipline, and often help, coaching and intervention from others.
• It’s easy to see this phenomenon when you track a cohort of individuals from the same age group over a longer period of time. Very often the initial superstar performers have major set backs at least partially induced by the punishing work schedule that got them to that status in the first place, whilst those who were somewhat slower manage to continue on successfully, building on a more sustainable work ethic.
• Even if the situation isn’t a burn out one, it’s quite common to see people who have a bumper, decade long career progression stagnate, stall, or even seemingly regress backwards. With the right mindset, these set backs are entirely manageable. But sometimes people develop an unrealistic expectation of near-exponential career advancement that is sustained over a multi-decade career, which of course, apart from in the most exceptional of circumstances, is simply not achievable.
• The final and most important concept relates to the hard fact that you can’t genuinely fast track cumulative life experience.
• One of the concepts that frustrated me the most very early in my career was the impression that for some career-related activities or advancements there was seemingly no way to fast track your path forward. As I’ve grown older and been able to reflect, it has become abundantly clear that, whilst many things can be fast tracked to a degree, things like life experience simply have to occur naturally and organically over time, and can’t really be crammed.
• Why is life experience relevant professionally? For the simple reason that most professions value and benefit from life experience, especially if you’ve grown from those experiences. The relevance of life experience also grows over your career as you become more senior, especially as you move from an individual contributor type technical role to a leadership type role. If you’ve lived a reasonably rich life, you’ll have thousands of experiences and learnings you can draw upon for just about any situation. New situations will rarely surprise you, and even noting slight differences, you’ll have familiarity and hence more confidence in how to approach and manage those situations. This gives an experienced person a supreme advantage over an inexperienced one, even if that inexperienced one has attempted to compensate by researching or reading about these life experiences – doing so can help a little but is never the same as the real thing. Life experience can help with just about every aspect of your professional career, and can compensate to some extent for any slight technical or skillset deficiencies in many situations. 
• Again, if you’re unusually young for your career stage, should you be worried about your lack of life experience? The answer is no, but that you should very much retain an awareness that, whilst you’ve fast tracked some aspect of your career, that doesn’t mean you’re as advanced in all aspects of your life as your professional peers. Don’t make the common “smart person” mistake of extrapolating capability and experience in one area to all other areas.
• If you’re so inclined, you can also have a little bit of fun with this, and get some insights into the assumptions that are baked into many professional interaction situations. One of my favourite professional social interactions has been turning up to an event where I am an invited plenary or keynote speaker, often in somewhat casual clothes if I’ve been travelling to get there, and chatting to people at the event without revealing any of the specifics of my involvement there. Often I’ve been confused for a PhD student or postdoc, and you can learn a lot by the way that people talk to you and treat you based on their impression of your relative professional standing, sometimes in very humorous ways. It’s emphasized to me that you should always be careful and respectful with your assumptions – you never know who you’re actually talking to!
• Reaching a certain career stage at an unusually young age can be exciting, great for your ongoing career prospects, and give you early access to learning opportunities that you otherwise might not have had until many years later. If you keep in mind all the necessary caveats – especially around concepts like fast tracked careers not being the same as having the life experience of your older peers – then you can really make a mark in your career at a relatively young age.