The best career advice Barack Obama gave his ex-speechwriter

When your boss is the president of the United States and gives you career advice, you take it.

Aneesh Raman was working as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2013 and remembers one key piece of career advice the president would often share: “Worry about what you want to do, not who you want to be.”

Before his political career, Obama got his start in community organizing in Chicago. He may not have started his career wanting to be president, but “he wanted to build communities in a different way,” Raman tells CNBC Make It, “and it led him on his path that led to this moment where he became president.”

Rather than thinking about your dream title, Raman recommends thinking about the impact you want to make through your work and the skills you’ll need to get there. Then, evaluate whether certain jobs or employers will help you acquire those skills to reach your goals.

Raman, who’s now a vice president and workforce expert at LinkedIn, says the advice is especially crucial to young professionals today who may one day end up in roles that don’t yet exist. LinkedIn recently identified fast-growing jobs on the rise in 2024, including chief growth officer and sustainability analyst — many of which didn’t exist 20 years ago.

He recommends thinking of your career in the following phases:

From age 20 to 35, learn your core skills based on things what you’re excited about, what you’re good at and what you want to get better at.From age 35 to 45, use your unique skillset and apply it to an issue of expertise. This can be specific to a field, like health care, or a broader topic, like Raman’s expertise of “economic opportunity.”Finally, at age 45 and beyond, think about what kind of impact you want to make on your organization and on the world.

This framework is the “safest” way to think of a long-lasting career, Raman says, “because you can control all of those levers, versus job title. You might want to be a VP of something at somewhere, but you can’t control any of that, and that job might not even exist in 20 years.”

Aneesh Raman has built what he calls a “squiggly line” career path, where he’s worked as a CNN war correspondent, head of economic impact at Facebook and former Obama speechwriter.

Courtesy of Aneesh Raman

Raman is a fan of what he calls a “squiggly line” career that isn’t quite linear but still has a connective thread. He lives it, too: In addition to working for the Obama administration, Raman also worked as a CNN war correspondent in the Middle East, head of economic impact at Facebook, and senior advisor in the Office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“My job titles as a career don’t make sense,” he says, “but my skills across the board are storytelling and coalition building” around economic opportunity.

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