As a product manager, Mr. Kurian added sales and marketing and team management to his engineering background. He later did a stint as a strategy consultant, which he recalls as a crash course in quickly synthesizing information about unfamiliar situations. He considers the combination of all of these areas a key to his path to becoming chief executive of NetApp, a data storage company with a $10 billion market value.
He represents one common way to collect experience across functions: Within a larger company, pursue opportunities that are adjacent to, yet different from, existing expertise.
“People tend to think of their career as a linear progression,” he said. “I think having a nonlinear career progression helped me.”
The LinkedIn data doesn’t address causality. Did Mr. Kurian advance to a C.E.O. job because he gained experience across different functions, or did the traits that led him to take on a variety of assignments in his career also lead to his being an attractive candidate for top jobs? And the former consultants who created detailed LinkedIn profiles may be different in some systematic way from those who did not, which would distort the results.
Beyond the results on job functions, the data from LinkedIn shows some trends for which the explanations aren’t completely obvious. For example, former consultants who lived in New York or Los Angeles had higher odds of ending up with a top job than people in other large cities like Washington or Houston. A former management consultant with 15 years of work experience in six different functions and an M.B.A. from a top school had a 66 percent chance of becoming a top executive if he lived in New York compared with a 38 percent chance in Washington.
But regardless of how exactly the cause and effect works and how the consultants analyzed might be different from others who weren’t included in the sample, there is evidence that more top jobs in business require an ability to meld knowledge from different fields.
In a 2014 survey of 2,100 chief financial officers by Robert Half Management Resources, 85 percent said their role had expanded beyond traditional accounting and finance-related work over the preceding three years, most commonly into human resources and information technology.
And two business school professors, Jennifer Merluzzi of Tulane and Damon J. Phillips of Columbia, studied hundreds of graduates of an elite M.B.A. program who went into investment banking. The people who were specialists — who had focused only on banking in the past — received fewer offers and lower starting bonuses than those who had worked across various specialties.
Burning Glass found a 53 percent rise in the number of openings for hybrid jobs requiring both technological and business acumen from 2011 to 2015, for jobs like product management and marketing analytics.
“The common theme that we see in the jobs that are the fastest-growing and have the highest value for employers and job seekers is this set of jobs that require a mix of skills that don’t tend to ride together in nature,” said Matthew Sigelman, the chief executive of Burning Glass.
Entrepreneurial Options
There are ways a young person can gain experience across functions that aren’t a matter of taking on different assignments within a big company. Marla Malcolm Beck embodies this other, more entrepreneurial path.
Ms. Beck worked in consulting right out of college in the mid-1990s, then studied at Harvard Business School and worked briefly in private equity. But she found the work unfulfilling, and in 1999 started Blue Mercury as an online seller of beauty products. Soon after, as the dot-com boom turned bust, the company pivoted toward physical stores.
Ms. Beck built Blue Mercury into a 109-store chain. Macy’s acquired the company for $210 million last year, and she remains its chief executive.
In her days as a consultant she had worked on projects like figuring out the pricing of mutual funds and re-engineering the claims process for an insurance company. As a retail C.E.O., she essentially trained herself across the various functions it takes to make a retail business work: inventory and supply chain management, information technology systems and everything else.
She acted as the company’s chief financial officer even as it grew, entrusting routine accounting to a controller but doing the strategic work of forecasting and financial modeling herself. Some fields have come easier to her than others. “I think I’m almost too logical for some of the emotion around marketing,” she said.
Her approach has been to break down each of these new areas in which she had to immerse herself as a start-up founder the way she once did in unfamiliar fields as a consultant.
“What I really learned from those experiences was how to break down even the most complicated processes into their most minuscule components,” she said. “It’s an approach that you can use to tackle any process in any organization.”
In hiring at Blue Mercury’s corporate headquarters in Washington, she has focused less on traditional retail industry experience and more on people who have a comfort with engineering processes, skills they can apply to whatever urgent task arises.
In other words, she didn’t become chief executive by getting loads of experience across functions. Rather, she took some core analytical skills and used them to learn to develop experience in those functions as she went.
There are some parallels with programs that the biggest companies have long operated to deliberately rotate promising young executives across different divisions, to ensure that as they hit midcareer they have broad experience. The challenge can be to replicate that kind of experience even in a world where few people sign on with a single large employer for decades.
To be a C.E.O. or other top executive, said Guy Berger, an economist at LinkedIn, “you need to understand how the different parts of a company work and how they interact with each other and understand how other people do their job, even if it’s something you don’t know well enough to do yourself.”
Out of the Comfort Zone
Kai Monahan embodies a third pathway through different specialties into top executive jobs. He didn’t start his own company, like Ms. Beck, or gradually add different layers of experience that were adjacent to his previous job, like Mr. Kurian.
Rather, at some key junctures he jumped headlong into an entirely new function. In 1999, he left the (now defunct) accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen, where he had worked on projects to transform businesses, for Ernst & Young, where he focused on risk management, a less sexy field that became more in demand after the accounting scandals at Enron and others starting in 2001. In 2008, he joined Nationwide Insurance as its chief audit executive, before quickly moving out of the back office and into selling financial products to consumers in an operational role. He became president of Nationwide’s mortgage business in 2014.
It helped that he had an early mentor who encouraged him to take risks in his career by taking on jobs he was unfamiliar with — and bosses willing to take a chance on assigning him jobs he wasn’t qualified for on paper.
After all, if you assign, say, an accounting specialist to run a logistics operation, there’s a chance that person will fail. What’s best for the employee who wants to get broad experience to help climb the ranks may not be what is best for the employer who wants deeply experienced people in every job.
“There’s comfort in familiarity,” Mr. Monahan said. “Leaders can be reluctant to hire someone who doesn’t have directly applicable experience. That’s still a mind-set that is fairly prevalent.”
But how does one navigate into sharply different functional specialties while also dealing with new colleagues and a new organizational culture? “If you’re in your comfort zone, it’s very easy to stay in your comfort zone,” said Paul McDonald, a senior executive director at the recruitment firm Robert Half International.
“What was critical for me in going into new functional areas was breaking that habit of feeling like you have to know it all,” Mr. Monahan said. “When you’re honest with yourself and with others in terms of your need for their support and involvement, generally people are willing to share with you what they know and help you be successful.”
In other words, the path to the executive suite may be long and winding, and include stops in many different types of specialties. But the key to navigating it is being able to learn from others all along the way.
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