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Liz Centoni has tried at least a dozen roles at Cisco and now leads 20,000 employees.
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When transitioning jobs, Centoni advises leveraging networks and seeking roles that create disruption.
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She added that job transitions can be uncomfortable, even after months in a new role.
Liz Centoni thought she would be at Cisco for three years max when she joined in 2000 — she didn’t expect to be on the executive leadership team 25 years later.
“My brain worked more as a linear thinker,” Centoni said in an interview with Business Insider. “And, you know, careers are not linear.”
Centoni has since mastered the career transition, working in 12 or 13 roles since being onboarded as a software engineer. Now she leads 20,000 people at the company as Cisco’s executive vice president and chief customer experience officer.
As AI continues to reshape the job market, it’s difficult to predict which roles will be around in the next 10 or 20 years. Even once-stable career paths, like software engineering, are now mired in uncertainty as AI increasingly becomes capable of various coding tasks.
Centoni welcomed job transitions long before the AI revolution took off, and she’s learned a few things. This is her advice for navigating career shifts.
Centoni recommends leveraging your network if you’re thinking about making a career transition.
That may entail talking to friends or former coworkers outside your company to find out more about what they do. Or, you can channel your existing colleagues and see if there’s an opportunity to make a switch internally.
“Take advantage of the network that you have around,” Centoni said. “People who can connect you with different things, open up opportunities, mentors, sponsors.”
Centoni said it can be difficult to see beyond the work you do and the world you live in. Speaking to others can help you see it “more broadly,” she said.
Centoni said the ability to be flexible, curious, and open-minded gave her access to more opportunities and eventually led her down the path of executive leadership. While it may be simpler to follow a linear path, Centoni suggests broadening your search and looking for opportunities that create disruption.
“Think about areas where you’ve got to look broadly versus what you’re doing right now,” Centoni said. “Is there an opportunity for you to kind of redefine the future, versus just working through what somebody’s already defined?”
Centoni said she likes to pursue “something that’s not perfect, but has potential.” Sometimes those opportunities appear less clear or structured, she said. For Centoni, they’ve come with learning new technologies and domains, which wasn’t always effortless. However, they allowed “the opportunity to create something” and felt more rewarding long-term.
