Friday Hacks #218: How to Build a Career Moat
Channel: NUS Hackers
Date: 2022-03-13

How to build a career moat

You might be asking these questions:

How do you evaluate job opportunities?
How do you make career decisions when you’re still learning your strengths, when you don’t know what you like, and when you can’t predict the future?

One answer is that you build a career moat first, before taking larger career bets later!

A career moat is an individual’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over your competition (say, in the job market) in order to protect your long term prospects, your employability, and your ability to generate sufficient financial returns to support the life you want to live.

This talk describes what a career moat is, what types of moats exists, the principles behind why they work (and how to identify them), and then goes into detail on how to build one!

Speaker Profile:
Cedric Chin helped create the NUS Hackers, and, upon graduation, vanished into Vietnam to run the software engineering office for a Singaporean company (and also to complete his tuition grant bond). He helped that company pivot from outsourcing to product and bootstrapped it to a sweet single-digit million dollars in annual product revenue over the course of three years. He currently runs his own thing and writes at https://commoncog.com/blog.

Chapters:
0:00 How to build a career moat
52:40 Q&A