Ten Years of From Campus to Career: What the Decade Taught Me About the Workforce

Ten years after writing From Campus to Career, the workforce has changed in three big ways — and the fundamentals still hold. A decade-in-review essay.

Leilani Brown, Author

From Campus to Career: 25 Tips For Your First Professional Year

10th Anniversary Edition

When I sat down in 2016 to write what began as From Campus to Cubicle — 25 Tips for Your First Professional Year, I had spent years volunteering, and sometimes being voluntold, to give the intern and first-year talk at my company. That January, as a New Year's resolution of sorts, I wrote it down. I thought the book might sell a few hundred copies and let me cross "author" off a worn-out bucket list.

It did not stay inside my company for long. Hiring managers, talent leaders, and college career offices all started asking the same thing: could I help their interns and first-years with the things they needed on day one but would never find in a job description?

The gap was real and it needed to be named. Essential skills, soft skills, what I grew up understanding to be life skills — were eroding. Communication. Follow-through. Reading a room. Knowing when to ask and when to listen. The basics that used to be assumed were no longer guaranteed.

In 2021, I retitled the book From Campus to Career. The cubicle was disappearing under the weight of COVID. The career was not.

And then a decade happened.

If the original reader was 21 when they picked it up, they are 31 now. Three things have shifted underneath them: the job search broke, the mental load got heavier, and the deal got thinner — mass layoffs by email, shorter tenures, loyalty assumed in neither direction.

But the fundamentals have not changed. The internet and the speed of AI just made it look like they did.

The 31-year-old reader I am hearing from now is facing three things at once: the first real loss, the visibility crisis, and the AI undertow. Every one of them is a relationships problem wearing a different costume — and the answer is still what it was a decade ago. Experience. Accomplishments. Relationships.

How you show up still matters. How you behave when no one is keeping score still matters. The relationships you build in the first decade are what you harvest from in the second.

The fundamentals have not changed. The internet and the speed of AI just made it look like they did.

Read the full essay — including the playbook on what to do at the inflection point — on Substack.