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Sheryl Sandberg says that the traditional advice to choose a job, map each promotion and plot out where you will be in 10 years no longer fits today\u2019s world. The former chief operating officer of Meta recently told college graduates at Brandeis University in a commencement speech<\/a> to stop planning out their careers when the future is uncertain.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need a 10-year plan,\u201d Sandberg said. \u201cIf I had one, I would have missed the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandberg said graduates needed two things instead of a 10-year plan: short-term direction, or \u201csomething to work towards right now,\u201d and a long-term dream, \u201ca sense of the life you want to build.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t try to connect those two points,\u201d she said. \u201cThe path is going to surprise you, and the opportunity lies in those surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandberg\u2019s own journey shows how she adapted when the job market looked uncertain.\u00a0<\/p>\n After graduating from Harvard with her MBA in 1995, Sandberg worked<\/a> at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. Once that administration ended, she struggled to figure out what came next. She said in the commencement speech that there were days she truly believed she would never get hired. When she finally did receive an offer, she worried that the company, a young startup, wouldn\u2019t make it. That company turned out to be Google, which famously turned into a tech giant and has a market capitalization of $4.7 trillion<\/a> at the time of writing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg joined Google early, in 2001, and helped grow its sales team from four people to 4,000. In 2008, she moved to Meta, where she became CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s top lieutenant. She couldn\u2019t have mapped out those career moves in advance, because the technology and those jobs didn\u2019t exist when she was a fresh graduate.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg stepped down as Meta\u2019s COO in the fall of 2022<\/a>, noting that she planned to spend her time focusing on philanthropy. <\/p>\n Sandberg\u2019s guidance comes at a time when young workers are especially on edge. Gen Z graduates are stepping into a job market that AI is rapidly reshaping. Tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are warning that entire careers could disappear.\u00a0<\/p>\n A January 2025 report<\/a> from the World Economic Forum found that nearly half of all global employers expected to replace significant numbers of workers with AI in the next four years. Entry-level staff, in particular, are most likely to be cut first.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg addressed those worries head-on.<\/p>\n \u201cI know many of you are rightly worried about what comes next,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019ve seen the headlines: This year\u2019s graduates face the toughest job market in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n But she also reminded them that this feeling isn\u2019t unique to their class. She pointed to her own experience and past graduating classes to show that \u201cworst year to graduate\u201d headlines crop up again and again.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDeclaring this particular year the worst is a tradition almost as old as graduation itself,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not telling you the job market is easy, but every generation has figured it out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Sheryl Sandberg says that the traditional advice to choose a job, map each promotion and plot out where you will be in 10 years no longer fits today\u2019s world. The former chief operating officer of Meta recently told college graduates at Brandeis University in a commencement speech<\/a> to stop planning out their careers when the future is uncertain.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need a 10-year plan,\u201d Sandberg said. \u201cIf I had one, I would have missed the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandberg said graduates needed two things instead of a 10-year plan: short-term direction, or \u201csomething to work towards right now,\u201d and a long-term dream, \u201ca sense of the life you want to build.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nSandberg says that every year feels like the worst time to graduate<\/h2>\n
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