Whether you just started your career or have experience going back decades, a startup provides unique opportunities to improve yourself and your career. Here we consider five benefits that come with working at January.
Opportunity to Develop Skills
Even as a newcomer to the company, we rely on your work for our success. Startups have less redundancy for jobs, meaning your job title or responsibilities may solely belong to you. This level of urgency provides incredible motivation to hone your skills and perfect your craft.
Working at January entails not only work you are familiar with, but acquiring new skills. Often work abounds that doesn’t yet justify a full-time employee. As a result, managers constantly think about how they allocate high impact work to members of their teams. This gives them opportunities to broaden their skillsets.
January provides opportunities to have a deep sense of ownership and accomplishment in your work. While we’ve built the foundations for a lot of what we do, there’s a lot of opportunity to continue to refine what we’ve built or build completely new things from scratch.
Additionally, January provides explicit opportunities for learning. The company sponsors internal book clubs like our engineering and management book clubs which discuss topics that employees face every day. We also provide a budget for all employees to put towards learning and development initiatives.
These benefits allow you to build a repertoire of specialized skills that will help further your career.
Opportunity for Career Growth
A growing company like January has increasing needs for leaders of every type. Junior people need senior people to mentor them. Groups of people need managers to manage them. Rapidly growing organizations need executives to lead them.
As an example, if you were in the earlier stages of your career as an engineer you might target a position as a senior engineer. At January, your manager and other senior engineers would help you discover technical proficiencies, project management, and communication skills that will guide you to that next level of your career.
One senior engineer shared:
Moving to a senior engineer position has been a great journey, one that January helped make possible through their amazing culture anchored around collaboration, support, and mentorship. A few months ago, I asked for the opportunity to be part of a pilot team that spearheaded work into a new product vertical that challenged me to design a robust system and manage the project from a high level. Many of the skills I developed while leading the project are now leveraged day to day as a senior engineer on my team: deeply understanding business requirements and cutting scope when needed, driving alignment between product and engineering teams, executing on a timeline that required careful sequencing of dependencies, and communicating challenges and expectations to the broader organization.
When you finally have an opportunity to interview for a new position, consider the interviewer seated across from you. At January, employees commonly know the majority of the people they work with. Your interviewer will likely know you, your work ethic, and will have seen your level of dedication. Equally, they will have a good sense of areas that you need to develop to be fully successful in your new role.
Job Satisfaction
Impact and community membership represent two additional reasons why team members are satisfied with their work at January.
When you work in a startup, you will find it easier to equate outcomes to the work you have performed. One engineering manager shared:
I’ve had the opportunity to work on many significant features—one that stands out is a workflow engine that allows our operations team to automate various tasks. It has been incredibly gratifying to increase the leverage of our internal users by unburdening them from rote tasks. Furthermore, our workflow engine has positively impacted client relationships by delivering results faster and more correctly.
Also, with a smaller team, it’s hard not to notice hard work. At January, we go out of our way to celebrate #kudos and #wins in Slack channels to put a focus on the contribution you make towards the company’s success.
Job satisfaction comes more easily when you have a team that you enjoy working with. January finds opportunities for the whole company to meet each other through regularly scheduled outings. We brought the team together for an outing at Governors Island this year, teams on both coasts have been making outings to baseball games, and we meet up (optionally, of course) for dinners together. We also set up weekly meetings between groups of 3 employees to help you meet everyone at the company.
Your Voice Matters
When you work at a company with less than a hundred people, getting your idea heard by the CEO or senior executives comes as easily as eating lunch. Startups naturally have fewer tiers of management between IC and executive leadership compared to companies with thousands of people. This gives you an opportunity to share any idea that you’ve been considering.
Equally important, getting an idea shared across the company to enact change involves fewer people. The difficulty of building consensus lessens when you consult fewer people. This helps to evolve your culture more quickly in response to workplace challenges.
Own a Meaningful Piece of the Company
Startups like January provide stock option grants that let you earn ownership of the company with your continued employment. As startups’ valuations multiply and compound over a short period, these stakes can become quite meaningful.
