Most people think career is about choice or preference. It is mostly about exposure. Doors you do not know are there, you cannot knock on.

Till well after I completed my engineering, I was not aware that Life Coach is something you can be. As a professional, that is. Till yesterday I did not know about “wellness retreat operator”. And did you hear about the company which is trying to hire for the role of a professional AI bully? Apparently the role is supposed to be for stress testing new AI models.

How many roles like this are sitting outside your current frame, right now?


World's meanest employee - 2027.

Path visibility is accidental and limited.

Someone not clued into the existence of such roles would not even know to consider them as legitimate options. Ambition is bounded by awareness. And this awareness has traditionally been an accident of your network or your era. Mostly inherited from what your parents did. Or what your friends were trying to get into or what got offered at the college by the placement office. Chances are none of these would have had “Prompt Engineer” / “Influencer” / “Food blogger” on the catalogue. They just did not exist back when I was graduating. And some of these are still not offered as a formal career choice.

Your career awareness remains a reflection of your network’s career awareness. And that compounds.

First-gen professionals start with a narrower slice; and the gap only widens. A year into their career, while our first-gen “engineer” is still getting comfortable with the role, a peer whose uncle was a software engineer back in the day has already heard about product management over a family dinner, already knows people leave TCS for startups, already has someone in the family who can explain what a VC actually does

Sociologists call it the Matthew Effect.


Initial advantages compound. Rapidly.

This blind-spot in the map of possibilities costs time. Sometimes even decades.

A close friend of mine - engineer by training - spent the better part of a decade finding her way to qualitative research. Not because she lacked ability. She just did not know the field existed. She had recently created communication material for an NGO working with impoverished communities - a story format she developed after pestering them to embed her in their field visits. That work eventually became a YouTube video with over 11 million views. But even that experience didn’t show her what she could become. Qualitative research simply wasn’t a field in her orbit. She didn’t know anyone who did it. Instead, she saw her work as proof that she was “good at writing”. So she started writing for an online recipe content farm. Then moved to a newspaper through a connection from a friend’s mother. Then Content Manager. Then a marketing agency. Then a journalism course to improve her prospects, finally working her way to Qualitative Research a couple years later. Each step reasonable. And each step a guess; at best informed by the limited visibility of branches from where she found herself at the moment.

The entire journey took years to arrive somewhere she could have found much earlier, had a map existed. Or if someone in her orbit showed her the options.

The discovery gap doesn’t mean people can’t forge new paths. Some do. But “stumble into it over years” is not the best system to rely on. Stuck in a cookie-cutter role mass-manufactured, people start to chafe. They start “looking out”, unsure of the direction. At best, they know ‘not this’. Which puts them in the explore mode. And exploration is not something the typical career-navigation tools are built for.

The tools we have built to navigate careers have actually made it worse.

Job boards need you to already know what you are looking for. You type a title into a search bar. If you do not know the title exists, the search bar is useless. It is a tool for the ladder-climber.

LinkedIn shows you what people like you already do. Which is perpetuating the same problem: reflecting your existing network’s career awareness back at you. If your network does not contain a single “Red Teamer” or “Somatic Therapist”, neither will your feed.

Placement offices bring whoever comes to campus. Which is itself a filter. Only certain kinds of companies, with certain kinds of roles, with certain kinds of hiring volumes bother to show up. The rest of the landscape simply does not exist in that room.

Network capital compounds the gap

Knowing a role exists is one thing. Knowing someone who does it - someone who can say “this is real, here’s how I got here” - is different. That is what I have been calling the “Network Capital”,1. It doesn’t just open doors. It makes doors visible as doors.

This access-gap is partly responsible for the discovery-gap but it is a whole different problem on its own. Did you think just because I happened to know about “Farm-to-Table” entrepreneur”, I could simply become one? Does not work that way. Usually you need to know someone who knows someone who can open these doors for you. Just to let you have a real glimpse of what is it like on the other side. And should you want to go through, show you the ropes. But this uneven distribution of network-capital is a different problem for a different post.

Most career interventions - mentorship, internships, introductions - address the access gap. Almost nothing addresses the discovery gap, which comes earlier and matters more. And this gap has always been hard to close from the outside.

AI could help eventually; But for now, it is only accelerating the problem

AI is disrupting entire industries faster than awareness of new roles can travel through normal networks. And in the process, making the discovery problem all the more acute. From both the supply-side with the fast changing landscape, as well as on the demand side - with a lot of people forced to navigate this changing landscape.

Careers which did not exist five years back would be all the rage, only to fade away just as suddenly. Remember “Prompt Engineering”? Now we have “Red Teamer”, “Head of personality alignment”, “AI bully” and more.

I spent good part of a week inside a dataset of over 600,000 professional profiles from a global community platform - extracting job titles, skill tags, career bios - trying to map this landscape. The dataset had 85,872 unique job titles across 604,000 records. Even after filtering down to a sample of just 38,000 most detailed records from the dataset, the clustering produced 343 distinct role identities. This was after normalising self-described role descriptions and designations across orgs. These were roles most people have never heard of. Roles that didn’t exist when a lot of us were sitting for placement interviews at college. In fact, a lot of these are still not part of the career-discussions. And this was just one platform, skewed toward the creative and indie economy.

The rate of the role creation or role change has far outpaced the rate of role visibility. And the people with the fullest map are not necessarily the smartest. They just started in a room with more doors visible to them.

CareerMap

CareerMap is one attempt at the discovery layer - Think of it like Google Maps, but for careers.

You can explore the landscape to see what’s out there, including the roles you’ve never heard of. Eventually, it will also show you the different paths to reach a particular point - say, Quantum Mechanics YouTuber from wherever you currently are, say HR at a SaaS company. The system would show different routes: through reading, through certifications, through degrees. Routes will have different milestones displayed. Also rough time-estimates per path.

Right now, I have only started on the first part: mapping the landscape. The v2 and v3 will tackle the paths.

It is not a job board. Click a role, see what it actually involves, find what sits adjacent to it. Or let it auto-scan to give you a tour of all that’s out there. It starts with the indie and micro-economy space because that is where the gap felt most urgent and least served.


Career Clusters in the indie space. An interactive demo with path-details coming soon.


It still does not solve the network problem. It does not fix access. It just tries to make more doors visible.

1: Network Capital is not something I coined. I am just using it in a crude manner in the sense I mentioned here. ↩

If the discovery-gap or network-gap in career exploration resonates with you, I’d love to hear your story, thoughts and ideas on how to best address these. DM me or reply here.