🚀Entering Tech #57: Building a career moat

Today’s question is a bit dreary. You’ll find the answer at the end of this newsletter.

In medieval times, moats were wet walls that kept attackers out, fire at bay, and fish on the menu. Similarly, career moats can keep you fed, and protect your value in the job market. 

Cedric Chin defines it as an “individual’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over your competition (say, in the job market) to protect your long-term prospects, your employability, and your ability to generate sufficient financial returns to support the life you want to live.”

Career moats are nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a way to build competitive advantage through an extremely rare set of skills that set you apart from the crowd such that you can find jobs easily and if you are ever laid off, you may easily find another job. See career moats as having the skills that make you a “hot cake” in the job market.

Putting this into perspective allows you to carefully plan your career moves ahead of time and think more strategically about your career. Cedric Chin says, “Job security is tied to your ability to get your next job, not keep your current one.” 

If you possess unique and extremely rare strengths and interests that are in high demand, you’ll never have to worry about layoffs because everyone will need you.

While we have established that career moats requires having rare and valuable skills, you might be wondering “What does having rare and valuable skills look like?” Cedric thinks about it in three ways, but I would emphasise two:

1. A skillset can also be rare and valuable if the skillset is unattractive but valuable. Not many people want to become data scientists, for example, because it requires problem-solving, analytical and mathematical skills. However, there exists a shortage of data talents globally—data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, etc, because data powers all AI and AI-enabled systems, and we don’t need to say that AI is here to stay. Building data skills is one example of building a career moat. It’s not an attractive skill and it’s one of those jobs that can have slow days, but it’s a valuable skillset. 

2. Next, a skillset can be rare and valuable if you specialise in it before it becomes clear that it is valuable. An example that comes to mind is Web3. When Web3 became popular in 2021, many people flocked to it like it was the best thing since sliced bread plantain. If only people those people had positioned themselves to offer specialised services in the space before the boom.

I recently met with a Web3 influencer and marketer, Precious Josiah, who set up a digital agency to help Web3 startups tell their stories better and connect with their target audiences. That’s another example of what a career moat looks like. Precious, who had previously worked with other global Web3 agencies saw an untapped African market and decided to build her own agency. She figured that if Web3 startups are littered the place, somebody would need to tell their story and break down the jargon into easy-to-understand language to the audience they are trying to sell to.

Another friend, Demilade Akin-Adeniyi, a UI/UX designer started positioning himself as a Web3 UI/UX designer. He chalked up his decision to the lucrativeness of the Web3 and crypto space. You too can find promising tech careers and determine what your career moat will look like. 

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To bring this home, I’ll share thoughts from two brilliant people. 

In a short call with me, Fu’ad Lawal, team lead of Archivi.ng, contends that staying ahead of the curve through continuous learning—a process motivated by curiosity and unrelenting dissatisfaction—is the greatest approach to building a career moat. 

Furthermore, in his podcast, “How to Build a Personal Moat to Further Your Career”, Morning Brew CEO Alex Lieberman says that building a career moat isn’t just about accumulating knowledge or building skills. It’s all about finding a mixture that creates a massive unlock in your career. In practice, there might be a lot of critical thinkers or high EQ folks out there, but there exists such a slim group of people who excel at the three skills. What do these skills look like in your current profession? You should aim to be among the top 1% of those who excel at all these skills.

I would like to know your thoughts on how you’re thinking about building career moats. Shoot me an email at faith.omoniyi@bigcabal.com.