Careers are a random walk
It’s a common statement that careers only make sense in retrospect. Another version of this is the Steve Jobs quote that “you can only connect the dots looking backward”:
Careers only make sense in hindsight. – What would a map of your career look like?
It strikes me that this is simply another way of saying that careers are random walks. Random walks can only be rationalized looking backward, and by definition cannot be rationalized going forward because the trend itself is stochastic (Stochastic trend). There is no deterministic trend that can be used to extrapolate forward. You can go ahead and fit one but it won’t mean anything.
If we take this idea seriously, attempts to rationalize careers, even after the fact, are foolish in the same way that “technical analysis” of the stock market is a waste of time. You fool yourself that there are stories in the data that might be useful for predicting the future or guiding behavior. If careers are a random walk, there are no stories. Or, said differently, there is only one story, which is the one that happened, as we can never know the DGP with any certainty or precision.
See also: Career success and career capital are cointegrated