Sheryl Sandberg Says to Abandon a 10-Year Career Plan

Sheryl Sandberg says that the traditional advice to choose a job, map each promotion and plot out where you will be in 10 years no longer fits today’s world. The former chief operating officer of Meta recently told college graduates at Brandeis University in a commencement speech to stop planning out their careers when the future is uncertain. 

“You don’t need a 10-year plan,” Sandberg said. “If I had one, I would have missed the internet.”

Sandberg said graduates needed two things instead of a 10-year plan: short-term direction, or “something to work towards right now,” and a long-term dream, “a sense of the life you want to build.”

“Don’t try to connect those two points,” she said. “The path is going to surprise you, and the opportunity lies in those surprises.”

Sandberg’s own journey shows how she adapted when the job market looked uncertain. 

After graduating from Harvard with her MBA in 1995, Sandberg worked at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. Once that administration ended, she struggled to figure out what came next. She said in the commencement speech that there were days she truly believed she would never get hired. When she finally did receive an offer, she worried that the company, a young startup, wouldn’t make it. That company turned out to be Google, which famously turned into a tech giant and has a market capitalization of $4.7 trillion at the time of writing. 

Sandberg joined Google early, in 2001, and helped grow its sales team from four people to 4,000. In 2008, she moved to Meta, where she became CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s top lieutenant. She couldn’t have mapped out those career moves in advance, because the technology and those jobs didn’t exist when she was a fresh graduate. 

Sandberg stepped down as Meta’s COO in the fall of 2022, noting that she planned to spend her time focusing on philanthropy.

Sandberg says that every year feels like the worst time to graduate

Sandberg’s guidance comes at a time when young workers are especially on edge. Gen Z graduates are stepping into a job market that AI is rapidly reshaping. Tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are warning that entire careers could disappear. 

A January 2025 report from the World Economic Forum found that nearly half of all global employers expected to replace significant numbers of workers with AI in the next four years. Entry-level staff, in particular, are most likely to be cut first. 

Sandberg addressed those worries head-on.

“I know many of you are rightly worried about what comes next,” she said. “You’ve seen the headlines: This year’s graduates face the toughest job market in decades.”

But she also reminded them that this feeling isn’t unique to their class. She pointed to her own experience and past graduating classes to show that “worst year to graduate” headlines crop up again and again. 

“Declaring this particular year the worst is a tradition almost as old as graduation itself,” she said. “I’m not telling you the job market is easy, but every generation has figured it out.”

Sheryl Sandberg says that the traditional advice to choose a job, map each promotion and plot out where you will be in 10 years no longer fits today’s world. The former chief operating officer of Meta recently told college graduates at Brandeis University in a commencement speech to stop planning out their careers when the future is uncertain. 

“You don’t need a 10-year plan,” Sandberg said. “If I had one, I would have missed the internet.”

Sandberg said graduates needed two things instead of a 10-year plan: short-term direction, or “something to work towards right now,” and a long-term dream, “a sense of the life you want to build.”