She changed roles at least a dozen times at Cisco. This is her advice to people considering a career transition.

Business Insider

21-04-2025

Liz Centoni thought she would be at Cisco for three years max when she joined in 2000 — she didn't expect to be on the executive leadership team 25 years later.
"My brain worked more as a linear thinker," Centoni said in an interview with Business Insider. "And, you know, careers are not linear."
Centoni has since mastered the career transition, working in 12 or 13 roles since being onboarded as a software engineer. Now she leads 20,000 people at the company as Cisco's executive vice president and chief customer experience officer.
As AI continues to reshape the job market, it's difficult to predict which roles will be around in the next 10 or 20 years. Even once-stable career paths, like software engineering, are now mired in uncertainty as AI increasingly becomes capable of various coding tasks.
Centoni welcomed job transitions long before the AI revolution took off, and she's learned a few things. This is her advice for navigating career shifts.
Lean into your network
Centoni recommends leveraging your network if you're thinking about making a career transition.
That may entail talking to friends or former coworkers outside your company to find out more about what they do. Or, you can channel your existing colleagues and see if there's an opportunity to make a switch internally.
"Take advantage of the network that you have around," Centoni said. "People who can connect you with different things, open up opportunities, mentors, sponsors."
Centoni said it can be difficult to see beyond the work you do and the world you live in. Speaking to others can help you see it "more broadly," she said.
Widen your search
Centoni said the ability to be flexible, curious, and open-minded gave her access to more opportunities and eventually led her down the path of executive leadership. While it may be simpler to follow a linear path, Centoni suggests broadening your search and looking for opportunities that create disruption.
"Think about areas where you've got to look broadly versus what you're doing right now," Centoni said. "Is there an opportunity for you to kind of redefine the future, versus just working through what somebody's already defined?"
Centoni said she likes to pursue "something that's not perfect, but has potential." Sometimes those opportunities appear less clear or structured, she said. For Centoni, they've come with learning new technologies and domains, which wasn't always effortless. However, they allowed "the opportunity to create something" and felt more rewarding long-term.
"I've left a footprint on all of these organizations, because the bold thinking, the disruptions," Centoni said, adding that the part that makes her the proudest is that the teams "continue to thrive" after she leaves.
Brace for discomfort
Despite Centoni's success in stepping into new roles, the Cisco executive has also struggled to make those transitions and find peace with them in the months after.
"There are two competing kind of voices in me," Centoni said. "One that wants to learn new things every single time, which means you're starting with something new. On the other hand, I also want to be really confident in the work that I do."
Centoni said one of her best career moves was pivoting from a role in network management, which she worked in for seven years, to a core routing group position. In her first six months on the job though, she questioned whether she made a mistake. Part of that was because she went from being the go-to person in a team to the "newbie."
"When you move to something new, all of a sudden, it's like you're learning more than actually what you're contributing," Centoni said, adding that those who lean Type A tend to want to see that they're "making the impact."
She said that even after multiple months, you can still feel like an intern and not a full-time employee, and moments like that made her wonder if she'd made the right move.
"In some places, the technology or the domain is a lot more complicated, and there's a lot more tribal knowledge to know that you're so dependent on multiple people over multiple months," Centoni said.
While uncomfortable, Centoni said those positions allowed her to take part in "continuous learning." Looking back, she said her biggest career regret was not pivoting sooner.