Apart from the game’s roots in morality lessons (where a player’s progression up the board represents a life journey complicated by virtues—ladders, and vices—snakes) it represents many instances in how our own situations challenge us to deal with them in our everyday life. I think how people deal with their careers is an object lesson of how the Snakes & Ladders metaphor can be apt. So, despite the chance nature of how one’s career evolves most have the ability to “load” their dice so that they have fewer encounters with the mouths of the long snakes and more with the bottoms of tall ladders.

Here are my tips on how to load your career dice.

1. If you are starting your career with your first job go for a job because you love it and not because of the money it pays. Carefully evaluate where this opportunity can take you in how you build your skills and how you will get new opportunities. I find that young graduates often go after jobs that pay them the most money without thinking through how this will shape their career.
2. Understand how you create value in your ecosystem and how it becomes visible. Most are good at doing a great job and letting others hijack the credit for it. If you do a good job make sure that you take care of showcasing it to the right people that matter and those who can advance your career.
3. Develop personal and professional mastery early in one area and become the go-to-person as a subject matter expert in that area. Regardless of what you want to pursue later—even going into management—having this mastery in one area will define your early career arc and its later success.
4. Once you get a hang of how to do your job and how others work with you, learn about what factors help your career and what do not. As you get better at your own job it is not just delivering what is expected of you that matters as much as how you delivered it does. Knowing how to take on new challenges that will advance your and your boss’ cause, identifying “hidden” opportunities within your own organization and company, and going out of the way to deliver excellence in everything you do early in your career can set the tone for you success throughout your professional life.
5. It is common to encounter a bad boss quite early in a career. So, do not be surprised if you feel stifled under such a tyrant. In fact it is well known that nearly 80% of the bosses are dysfunctional, incompetent, or are difficult to work with. So, rather than running away from such encounters try to develop strategies that allow you to not just cope with them, but to conquer them. This will be one of the most valuable skills you’ll learn to “load” your dice. Always remember, if you are running away from a bad boss you may land in a job with even a worse boss because of the 80% rule.
6. When changing jobs focus more on whom you’d work for (your boss) than where you work. Great companies can have bad bosses throughout (remember the 80% rule!), so if you feel that your next boss is going to be a detriment to your career avoid that encounter.
7. Look for signals that foretell you what is coming as you do your job. I cannot even tell you how many times I work with clients, who feel that they were blindsided by a sudden lay-off. When I talk through their experiences before their lay-off clear signals were available to them to prevent this surprise only if they knew how to stop going into denial and how to read such signals more clearly.
8. Decide early if you want to go into management and then start working on your development plan to get on the right track. Talk to others in more senior positions and find yourself a mentor to get guidance on such choices. Do not blindly pursue an MBA during your early corporate career with the hope that it will provide you an automatic license to succeed in the management track. MBA schools do a great job of marketing their programs.
9.  A key ingredient to ongoing career success is knowing how to build momentum where you are and how to parlay that momentum into your next role. I find that momentum is more important than a particular title or salary that you may secure in a company. Most people focus on their title and their compensation as a yardstick of their success. A better metric is career momentum in their current role.
10.  Be nice to those around you. Many believe that to be a manager you must be nasty or brutal to others, especially to your subalterns. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can be nice, but direct with an ability to create clear accountabilities. Remember, being nice takes effort and awareness. So, make an effort to be nice to others. You never know how you may encounter them later in your own career!

Hope that with this guidance you roll your career dice to always move to a square at the bottom of your next tall ladder and never roll it to land in the mouth of a long snake!

Good luck