Welcome back to Managing A Career, the podcast that helps you put yourself on the fast track for promotion. I'm your host, Layne Robinson.
Today's episode is all about a concept I'm calling the Career Speedrun. If you're into gaming, you probably know what a speedrun is: it's when players try to beat an entire game as fast as possible, skipping unnecessary parts, using shortcuts, and optimizing every move.
Now, when it comes to your career, you can't literally warp-jump from your first job straight to the corner office—but you can learn to recognize what slows you down, what accelerates your progress, and how to navigate the corporate world without wasting years wandering around levels that don't serve you.
Let's break down how to approach your career like a speedrun.
A career speedrun isn't about recklessly chasing promotions at the expense of everything else. Instead, it's about intentional acceleration.
It's asking: What do I actually want? How do I get there faster without burning out? And what shortcuts exist in the corporate world that most people don't notice?
The truth is, most careers stall because people spend years in roles that don't develop promotable skills, or they wait for someone else to "notice their hard work." That's like playing a game and waiting for the boss to beat himself. It doesn't work.
Let's borrow from gaming. Speedrunners have three rules:
Applied to your career, those rules look like this:
