Your Next Job Is Being Built in the One You Have Now
By Kristen Hayer
August 2026
On Steve's last day, he came by my office with a duffel bag over his shoulder to say goodbye, and when he set it down to give me a hug, it hit the floor with a thud. I laughed and asked what was in it. He told me it was every book from our leadership book club, along with all of the discussion sheets, because he wanted to start the same club with the support team he was about to lead at his new company.
Steve did not walk out of that building with a certificate. He walked out with a practice. Nobody had asked him for it, and there was no line on his resume that could have contained it, but it was the most useful thing he took with him.
I think about that duffel bag every time I talk with someone who is looking for their next role in Customer Success. Most people treat the job search as something that begins on the day they decide to leave, when almost everything that determines how it goes was built in the months before, inside the job they already had. Your current role is the least expensive training program you will ever have access to, and it is the only place where you can build evidence instead of assertions. Whether you plan to move in three months or three years, here is how to get more out of it.
Start by asking for training while someone else is still willing to pay for it. In my section of The Customer Success Talent Playbook, I make the case that you have to own your education, because most companies will not hand you a development plan. That is still true. What job seekers sometimes miss is that owning your education does not mean funding all of it yourself. Raise it in your next one-on-one, tell your manager which skills you want to build, and ask what already exists. If your manager does not know, ask your HR or enablement team, and ask whether there is a course they would be willing to approve. Even when the answer is no, you have told your manager that you are coachable and interested in growing, which is the kind of thing that gets remembered when a stretch assignment needs an owner. You have also learned something useful about whether this company intends to invest in you, which is worth knowing before you decide how long to stay.
Be deliberate about which skills you build, because it is tempting to develop only in the direction your current job happens to pull you. The gaps we see most often at The Success League, and the ones that come up again and again in hiring conversations, are selling skills like spotting opportunities and handling renewals, the ability to engage executives through better questions and multi-threading, and the ability to demonstrate value through goal setting, success plans, and business reviews. Those skills travel across companies, industries, and borders in a way that product knowledge never does. If you have the bandwidth to build only one thing this year, build one of those.
Then build things you can carry out the door. Some of the most useful assets I have moved between roles were ones I made myself, including a class on how to design a contest that motivates the right behavior, which I rebuilt for three different teams over the years. You can do this at any level. A set of discussion questions, an onboarding checklist for new CSMs, a business review structure, a renewal risk framework, or a book club that outlasts your tenure all demonstrate judgment rather than just time served. Be thoughtful about the line, since your employer's customer data, pricing, and proprietary material stay with your employer. The method is yours, and the method is what interviews are actually about.
Measure yourself the way a good manager would measure a training program. When I work with leaders on proving the value of training, I tell them to get clear on the objective, measure a baseline before anything changes, and then measure again once people have had time to apply what they learned. Do that for your own development. If you want to get better at asking questions on customer calls, find out how many you ask today before you start working on it. If you are trying to improve renewal outcomes in your segment, write down where they stand right now. Six months later you will have a specific number and a story about how you moved it, and that is a fundamentally different thing to bring into an interview than the claim that you are a strong communicator who cares about customers.
Pay attention to the people, too, because they are the part of this that lasts the longest. The peers whose calls you sit in on, the colleague in product who explains why a decision was made, and the manager who watched you handle an angry customer well are all future references, introductions, and in many markets the actual path to your next role. Hiring runs on relationships almost everywhere in the world, and a network built through real work together holds up far better than one assembled through connection requests sent in a hurry once you have decided to leave.
None of this requires you to be quietly halfway out the door, and I think that framing does people a disservice. Using your current job to prepare for your next one is not something you are taking from your employer. They get a more capable person for as long as you are there, and the numbers support that trade, since effective development can lift performance by as much as 25%. A company that helps you grow will usually keep you longer than it expected to. A company that will not has told you something you needed to know.
Steve spent years on my team building something he could use on someone else's, and I have never once regretted it. Whatever you are building right now, make sure it is something you can carry out the door.