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I Used to Think ‘Where Do You See Yourself in 10 Years’ Was a Horrible Interview Question
But I’ve since worked for almost twice that long and now I'm not so sure
Job interviews are curious things. For ages and ages, the dynamic leaned heavily in favor of the employer. They had a job people wanted, so it stands to reason they had the upper hand.
In some ways, this made sense. If a company was going to recruit, onboard, and engage an employee, it would be fair to inquire about the employee’s future plans — or at least their intentions.
One of the famed questions was: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I gave gloriously benign answers to this question when I began my career. Well, hopefully, I’ll still be here and excelling! That, of course, was nonsense. What 20-something knows what they’ll be doing in 10 weeks, let alone 10 years?
We weren’t thinking that far ahead, and the undergrad programs we recently finished weren’t training or encouraging us to think further than the immediate post-grad world. This was also lightyears before we reached a point where over four million people were quitting their jobs per month.
Now we’re in a wildly different place.
