Learning to Earn.

I started my career as an Analyst at Accenture at a time when many of my peers working in banking were earning 1.5× my income.

At 25, that difference felt significant. Today, I’m extremely grateful for the foundation that consulting experience gave me. It taught me how to think, solve problems, understand businesses, navigate complexity, work with different people, and keep learning.

Sometimes, what looks like the lower-paying opportunity is actually paying you in skills, exposure, experience, and access. A lot of young people trade an opportunity to learn for an opportunity to earn, often too soon. But life has a way of continuing our education long after school ends. The difference is that the exams become financial losses, bad investments, missed opportunities, and lessons from the school of hard knocks.

If I could give my 25-year-old self one piece of career advice, it would be this: Don’t be in such a hurry to earn that you miss the opportunity to learn. Learn the business. Learn from good leaders. Learn how money works. Learn how decisions are made. Learn skills people will eventually pay a premium for.

Because sometimes, the best-paying job isn’t the one that pays you the most today.

On MentorShip ….

For most of my early life, learning came with a teacher. In elementary school, I had teachers. In secondary school, teachers and principals. At university, lecturers and professors. Then I graduated and entered the working world.

There was no syllabus. No professor explaining the next chapter. No exam timetable warning me that a test was coming. But the tests kept coming. The difference was that my mistakes no longer cost marks. They cost money, time, opportunities, relationships, and sometimes years spent learning something I could have learned much earlier. (Heavy sigh).

I learned this in my own career, the hard way. I started my career as an Analyst at Accenture. At the time, many of my peers working in financial services were earning considerably more than I was.

Eventually, I left consulting for financial services because the money was better. At that stage of my life, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision. What I didn’t fully understand was that compensation isn’t always measured by what lands in your bank account at the end of the month. I was also being paid in skills, exposure, experience, networks, and learning.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have mentors helping me think through that trade-off. Someone further along in their career might have helped me ask a different question: Not just, “Which job pays more?” But, “Which opportunity is building the career I want five or ten years from now?”

Thankfully, the tides changed, and years later I found my way back into consulting with PwC Canada. I’m deeply grateful that I did. But every now and then, I wonder how different my career trajectory might have been if I’d had mentors much earlier.

I don’t dwell on it with regret. It became part of my education. Some lessons I learned from people who generously shared their wisdom with me. Others I paid tuition for at the school of hard knocks. And the tuition there can be expensive.

I’ve since learned that I don’t have to personally make every mistake in order to learn from it. Someone else’s experience can become part of my education if I’m humble enough to listen.

So, as I navigate my next chapter, I’m consciously asking myself: Who has already travelled the road I’m considering? Who can see around corners I can’t yet see? Who will challenge my thinking rather than simply affirm my decisions? Whose experience can help me make wiser choices about where I invest the next decade of my life?

Some of my best teachers came after I left the classroom. I just learned to call them mentors. If I could do it differently, I’d get a mentor right off the bat. I’d find someone a few steps ahead of me who could help me see beyond the salary of my next job to the trajectory of my career. I’d ask more questions. I’d pay closer attention to what I was learning, not just what I was earning.

And I’d think in decades, not just paycheques.

Formal education may end with graduation. Learning never does.