When we think of successful careers, we often imagine someone climbing the same ladder for 30-40 years. But Rajan Singh, a former IPS officer and IIT Kanpur alumnus, just reminded the internet that life doesn’t have to follow a straight line.
In his post, Rajan Singh detailed how he’s already explored eight different professions over the past 25 years.
He began his journey as an electrical engineering student at IIT Kanpur, where he studied for four years. Then, in 1997, he joined the Indian Police Service and served as an IPS officer for eight years, posted in Kerala. After leaving the force, he stepped into the corporate world as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company. Following that, he worked as an investor at a private equity fund. For a brief while, he even co-taught finance to investment bankers with a friend.
But Singh’s career graph didn’t stop there. He turned entrepreneur and entered the EdTech space, building learning products aimed at helping students. Later, he became a physics teacher and ran his own education venture. Most recently, his focus has shifted to designing training programmes rooted in psychology and neuroscience, aimed at improving focus, productivity, and helping people overcome digital addiction.
That’s eight careers – engineering student, IPS officer, consultant, investor, finance educator, edtech founder, physics teacher, and behavioural trainer. And he’s not done yet.
He took to LinkedIn to write:
“And if I get to live and work long enough, I hope to experience another 8-10 career paths. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It depends, I guess. Doing just one thing allows you to go deeper into your craft and benefit from ‘compounding’. But diverse experiences help you see unrelated patterns, connect dots, and generate insights that would otherwise be impossible. In some sense, you go through a veritable ‘horizontal compounding’, if you will.”
He also believes that chasing new skills, learning new things, and embracing change bring a different kind of joy. And he makes a solid point – “The age of learning one thing in college and milking it for the next 35 years is long over.”
Have a look at his full post here:
At 50, with eight careers behind him and more to come, Rajan Singh is living proof that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.