The Three E's of Career Growth
Grow faster by deliberately balancing experience, exposure, and education
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 87%
Most people default to education (reading, courses) or experience (doing the job) to grow, and overlook exposure — being present for things you don't yet own. Deliberately investing across all three, especially exposure, lets you grow faster and in more directions than the tasks your day-job strictly requires.
Origin
Costello recounts hearing about 'a framework called the three E's — experience, exposure, and education' and adopting it as a lens for purposeful career growth. The 70-20-10 lineage of the model comes from the Center for Creative Leadership.
Core principles
- 01Early-career people over-index on education, then over-index on experience, and neglect exposure.
- 02Exposure = being in the car but not the driver's seat: present, watching, evaluating impact.
- 03Being a learner in an exposure context accelerates growth beyond what your assigned work provides.
How to run it
- 1
Audit your current mix
Notice which of the three E's you're leaning on. If you're only reading and studying (education) or only grinding your assigned role (experience), you're missing a growth channel.
Watch out Treating growth as purely linear — education then experience — caps how fast and how broadly you can develop.
- 2
Seek exposure deliberately
Put yourself in rooms and situations where you're not the decision-maker but can observe how things play out and evaluate the impact. Be present and analytical rather than passive.
Pro tip Think 'you're not in the driver's seat but you're in the car' — watch what's happening and assess its impact.
- 3
Add education and experience where each fits
Match the growth method to the gap: get a mentor or coach (education) when you need to be told what you're missing, and take on the doing (experience) when you need first-hand reps.
Pro tip Sometimes the growth you need is a mentor or coach who will tell you what they're seeing, not another rep.
In the wild
In a high-stakes product review at Intuit, after everyone left, the business unit leader told Costello on her way out to 'always answer the question they should have asked.' This exposure-plus-education moment reframed how Costello handled meetings.
→ She learned to operate at a higher altitude — covering the bigger-picture point or overlooked alternative rather than answering questions one-to-one like a student taking a test.
Common mistakes
Treating growth as purely education then experience
Believing you must read about a skill and then do it in sequence ignores exposure, the channel that grows you fastest and most broadly.
Being physically present but not analytical
Exposure only pays off if you actively evaluate the impact of what you're watching; passively sitting in the room teaches you little.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors and early managers trying to be more purposeful and faster about career growth
Not ideal for
Someone who needs deep mastery of one narrow skill where focused experience alone is the bottleneck
From the transcript
“I remember hearing about a framework called the three E's experience exposure and education”
“exposure was such an important one where I thought like okay so you're not in the driver's seat but you're in the car and you're…”
From the episode
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics
Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit)