Scientect

Source: LinkedIn. By Prof Kolibea Mante, KNUST.

You know the look. You tell someone what you do, and their face does that small thing – the half-smile, the pause, the “oh, interesting” that means they have no idea where to file you. Then they turn to the person next to you, who said “lawyer” or “doctor” or “in tech,” and the conversation finds its feet again.

If that has happened to you more than once, you have probably been tempted to fix it. Pick one title. Lead with the cleanest version. Drop the messy middle bit where you switched fields, or took the year off, or said yes to that strange project nobody else wanted. Don’t. The mess is often the most interesting thing about you, and shrinking it to fit other people’s filing systems is a bad trade.

Somewhere along the way we were sold the idea that a career should read like a recipe. Step one, step two, step three, dish. Deviate and you’ve ruined it. But careers were never really like that, and they certainly aren’t now. Whole industries vanish in a decade. The interesting problems sit between disciplines, not inside them. The person who can move from a lab to a boardroom to a community meeting and hold their own in all three is not unfocused. They’re the one you actually want in the room when something hard needs solving.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the pressure to “make sense”: it’s almost never about you. When your aunt asks, again, why you left the bank, she is mostly asking whether the sacrifices she made for her own steady job were worth it. When an old mentor frowns at your pivot, he is often defending the road he didn’t take. When a friend calls you “brave” (and you can hear the quotation marks) she is doing quiet maths on her own risk appetite and not liking the answer. None of this is malice. It’s just that other people use your career as a mirror, and mirrors are not famous for flattering anyone.

There is a harder pressure too, and this one has teeth. Hiring platforms like keywords that repeat. Grant committees like narrow lanes. LinkedIn rewards the title that compounds. A zigzag career pays a tax at every checkpoint – fewer recruiter calls, more “we were looking for someone more specialised,” or “you’re overqualified”. Pay it anyway. Read More