I Bet You're Short-Sighted in Your Job Search (And Don't Even Realize It)
- Alex King
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Most job searches fail quietly.
Not because the person isn’t qualified. Not because the market is “bad.” But because the job seeker is optimizing for the next job, not the next set of skills.
And in today’s market, that’s a losing strategy.
The core mistake: thinking in titles instead of skills
White-collar work is being unbundled.
Jobs used to be neat packages:
Title
Responsibilities
Career ladder
That model is breaking.
AI, automation, and tooling have decoupled skills from roles. The same skill now shows up across multiple functions, industries, and titles.
But most people still search like this:
“What job matches my current title?”
Instead of asking:
“What skills do I already have that can compound into something bigger?”
That’s the short-sighted part and most people don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Why this is happening now
Three forces are colliding:
AI is collapsing learning curves: Skills that used to take years now take months.
Companies hire for outcomes, not pedigrees: Especially at startups and growth-stage companies.
Titles are becoming unreliable signals: “Manager,” “Director,” and even “Engineer” mean wildly different things across companies.
The result? Careers are no longer ladders. They’re skill graphs.
Examples of short-sighted job searches
Let’s make this concrete.
Example 1: Sales → “Only Sales”
Short-sighted thinking:
“I’m an Account Executive, so I should apply to AE roles.”
What’s actually transferable:
Objection handling
Pipeline management
Buyer psychology
Revenue forecasting
Narrative building
1-degree adjacent roles:
GTM Operations
Revenue Strategy
Partnerships
Product Marketing
Customer Success leadership
The mistake isn’t staying in sales, it’s not recognizing how portable sales skills are.
Example 2: Marketing → “Only Marketing”
Short-sighted thinking:
“I’m a demand gen marketer. I need another demand gen role.”
What’s actually transferable:
Experimentation
Funnel optimization
Data interpretation
Messaging
Growth modeling
1-degree adjacent roles:
Growth Ops
Product Marketing
RevOps
Analytics
Founder’s Chief of Staff
Marketing has quietly become an engineering-adjacent discipline, but many marketers haven’t caught up yet.
Example 3: Consulting → “Only Consulting”
Short-sighted thinking:
“I should move laterally to another firm or industry.”
What’s actually transferable:
Problem decomposition
Executive communication
Stakeholder management
Structured thinking
Ambiguity tolerance
1-degree adjacent roles:
BizOps
Strategy & Operations
Product Ops
Internal M&A / Corp Dev
Chief of Staff
Consultants who only chase “ex-consultant” roles often cap their upside early.
Example 4: Product → “Only PM”
Short-sighted thinking:
“If I’m not a PM, I’m moving backward.”
What’s actually transferable:
Customer discovery
Prioritization
Roadmapping
Cross-functional leadership
1-degree adjacent roles:
Product Marketing
Growth
Strategy
Platform Ops
Founder roles at early-stage startups
The PM title is not the asset. The decision-making muscle is.
Example 5: Ops / BizOps → “Only internal roles”
Short-sighted thinking:
“I’m behind the scenes, that’s where I belong.”
What’s actually transferable:
Systems thinking
Process design
Metrics
Leverage creation
1-degree adjacent roles:
GTM Engineering
RevOps
Data Strategy
AI Ops
Startup COO tracks
Ops is increasingly the center of gravity, not the back office.
The dangerous illusion of “playing it safe”
Short-sighted job searches feel responsible.
Same title. Same industry. Same pay band.
But they quietly create risk.
Because when your title becomes obsolete, many will be left without a narrative for what you actually do.
The safest careers today aren’t linear. They’re option-rich.
A better framework: optimize for skill compounding
Instead of asking:
“What’s the next logical job?”
Ask:
What skills am I already strong in?
Which skills are becoming more valuable because of AI?
What role gives me new adjacency, not just familiarity?
If this job disappeared in 2 years, what would I still have?
That’s how careers stay durable.
Why AI makes this unavoidable
AI doesn’t replace jobs. It replaces tasks.
Which means:
Jobs get sliced apart
Skills recombine in new ways
Titles lag reality
If you anchor to titles, you fall behind. If you anchor to skills, you stay mobile.
The uncomfortable truth
If your job search feels obvious…
If every role looks just like your last one…
If your story depends heavily on your title…
You’re probably being short-sighted.
And that’s okay as long as you fix it now.
Final thought
Careers aren’t built by repeating the same job at bigger companies.
They’re built by stacking adjacent skills until you’re hard to replace and easy to redeploy.
That’s the real game now.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
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