I had some ideas where I wanted to take my career next, however I was uncertain about what followed those positions.  The traditional way to find this out would simply be find somebody who currently or previously worked in that position and simply ask them.  They would tell you how they worked their way up into that role and give you their best guess at what most people do.  Problem is, even if you know someone, their frame of reference could be quite limited.  Perhaps they worked at the same company for the past 10+ years and all of their ladder climbing has been internal.  The truth is each company is a bit different.   So while you found one expert in one company, you still don’t have a solid idea.  Your sample size is 1.

How to do better?  Well surely if a sample of 1 gives you some information, then how about a sample of 10?  20?  100? 1,000?  10,000?  More is always better, right?  But let’s be realistic — I’m not about to survey 10,000 people just to figure out what I want to do with my career.  How else can we achieve the same result?  By using historical career data.  “Historical career data” is a fancy phrase that I just made up to mean resumes, CV’s or any other type of work history.  Everybody has a resume and in them contain a timeline of one job to the next, as well as educational background.  There is a lot of information in just one resume.  Now multiply that information by millions and you can start to see where this gets interesting.