Career LARPing

The best career advice I ever received was from my friend Jon(opens in new tab): "Fake it until you make it". While cliché, this simple phrase opened the door to my career in tech and taught me a fundamental truth—we're all just role-playing our way through professional life.

In career transitions, especially in tech, success often comes not from having perfect credentials, but from being willing to step into new roles and learn as you go. This is what I call Career LARPing.

Live Action Role Playing (LARP) might seem like an odd metaphor for career development. Picture people in a park dressed as wizards and knights, taking turns in mock battles. Unlike historical reenactments, LARPers wait their turn, following prescribed rules and roles. To outsiders, it looks strange—why isn't that knight attacking that elf?

This awkward waiting and learning period perfectly mirrors career transitions. You declare a new professional identity, take an uncertain stance, and learn the rules as you go. All while scrambling to understand the industry's lore, terminology, and customs.

When Jon shared his advice, I was a psychology graduate student at the University of Brighton, doing research for his consultancy, Flux. Realizing academia wasn't my path, I saw an opportunity: my research background could be reframed as UX research experience.

The first step was simple but significant—changing my LinkedIn title from "Academic Researcher" to "UX Researcher". Then came immersion: following industry leaders, reading UX books, joining design communities. I was learning the role before I had it.

This led to real opportunities: a digital democracy project in Portugal, a Bitcoin hackathon in Dublin where our team won an award, and eventually a position as Researcher in Residence at The New Digital School. Each experience built on the last, transforming my LARP into reality.

The European tech scene, with its abundance of boutique agencies and startups, provided fertile ground for my early career LARP. Through SwissContact (later Swiss EP), I advised startups across the Balkans, gave blockchain lectures, and led workshops—each role building on the skills and confidence gained from the last.

Returning to the US required adapting my LARP. After months of additional study, a Des Moines consultancy took a chance on me. Through their parent company Capgemini, I landed at Corteva Agriscience as a mid-level software engineer, learning Angular and leading development teams.

Looking back after nearly a decade, I see both the power and responsibility of this approach. At 23, advising teams and projects, I sometimes lacked the experience to match my role. While failure taught valuable lessons, I now understand the importance of balancing ambition with accountability.

Yet the core strategy worked. Career LARPing isn't about deception—it's about creating opportunities to prove yourself while actively working to deserve them. It's about recognizing that every expert started as a beginner who dared to step into a bigger role.

Today's tech landscape is more challenging for newcomers, with fewer junior positions and higher entry barriers. However, the principle remains valid: sometimes you need to embody the role you want before you fully possess it.

The key is to:

• Choose transitions that build on your existing skills
• Immerse yourself in the industry's culture and knowledge
• Take small opportunities to prove yourself
• Build a network of people willing to take chances on newcomers
• Balance ambition with honest skill development

Career LARPing isn't just about faking it until you make it—it's about creating the space to become what you aspire to be. In a world where traditional career paths are increasingly uncertain, the ability to thoughtfully reinvent yourself might be the most valuable skill of all.