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Steve Becker

Navy veteran, no degree, built a real career anyway. Writing about the climb and the closed doors.

A biweekly newsletter about building a real career without the traditional path — the climbs, the closed doors, and the mentoring lessons in between. Written by Steve Becker, a Navy veteran who worked his way from the mailroom to VP-level scope without a four-year degree.

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Featured Post

Better Pay, Same Trap

The first job I took in Kansas City looked like a clear win on paper. Same kind of role I'd had back in San Diego, but better pay, and the cost of living had dropped enough that the raise felt like a bigger raise than it actually was. Win-win, right there in the numbers. I remember doing the math more than once just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. What the numbers didn't show me was the org chart underneath the org chart. That job turned into a daily political battle — not one big blowup,...

8 days ago • 1 min read

Two years after that mailroom, I'd already been promoted three times. Three promotions in two years sounds like a success story, and depending on who's telling it, I guess it is. But three promotions came with three new sets of responsibilities and roughly one raise's worth of actual pay increase. I was doing more, carrying more, getting trusted with bigger problems — and going home every night doing math that didn't add up. Titles kept climbing. The paycheck wasn't keeping pace, and neither...

22 days ago • 1 min read

Stepping out of the Navy, my whole world had run on tight structure for years — you knew exactly what excellent looked like, because somebody had already written it down and made you say it back. Then I got out, and none of that translated onto a resume line a civilian recruiter could read. The only door that opened was the mailroom at a big financial company, so that's the door I walked through. I spent my first few weeks learning a company the strange way — through its outgoing mail, which...

about 1 month ago • 2 min read