If “A = L + E” is the heart of accounting and “credibility” is the heart of leadership, then the heart of career growth is “networking.”
Networking means you try to get to know people who know people. It’s not the same as making friends; you are actively looking to find people who are in a position to get you what you want, in exchange for you helping them out. If it seems contrived, it is, but everybody else is playing the same game, so there’s no need to feel odd for passing out business cards to anybody who will take them. Tools like LinkedIn are useful for managing your network, as most people who network are already on that service, and it’s more career-oriented than Facebook.
There’s a constant tension between employers and employees: employers want you to stick around for a long time, but they’re decreasingly likely to offer you the incentives to do so, like pensions. On the flip side, employees are increasingly likely to be more entrepreneurial; average job tenure for a college grad today is around 18 months.
This is not so much a bad thing as it is a different thing, and a return to the normal state of things: the concept of the monolithic modern corporation is not more than a few hundred years old. Prior to that, everybody–the innkeeper, the farmer, the tailor, the blacksmith–was basically self-employed.
So you need a good network, and you need to come to terms with the fact that you’re probably not going to start working for IBM at 22 and continue on until you retire with a fat pension. Once you’re comfortable with that, you can start to shape your career into something satisfying on a personal and financial level.
And if you’re not comfortable with really taking the reins of your career…well, best of luck, because it’s going to be a tough road.