Competitive is actually a strong word. It means a trait that defines an entity to fight or compete against other similar individuals or organizations, depending on the field. It indirectly means that professionals are living in a competition and naturally competition will end with winning or losing. For me, a competitive professional is a person that is capable to satisfy most of the top-level industry needs.

Defining Top-Level Industry

Defining a quantitative measurement of what being named Top-Level Industry is kinda difficult, so I will just try to give the best opinion that I can. I will try to use football world as an example.

In 2007, based on this article released by FIFA, there are approximately 1.4 million registered football players in England, the country where football was found. I believe that this number also includes youth players.

Premier League, the top level league in England, has 20 teams. Every team in Premier League is only allowed to register 25 players. That means, there are 500 players competing on top league every season. That’s 0.035% of 1.4 million. So, basically you need to be the 3 or 4 best out of 10000 professionals and students.

If we include the second level of league in England, there are 1100 football players. That is roughly 0.08%, 2 out of 2500 people. The numbers seem to be scary. These people are highly competitive individuals with top class skills and attitudes because they need to perform in a such high standard.

Does It Mean That I Should Stop Helping People With Similar Profession?

In the field where I am working, software engineering, the answer is no. It is very dangerous if a software engineer turns down any request of helping fellow software engineers. People mostly start with a question, where you have to answer that question. Answering question will help you to refresh your knowledge and sometime challenge your perception about something, which will definitely improve yourself. Rejection can lead you to be stuck at where you are.

This is also the main reason that in software engineering, it is very common to share knowledge or resources through open source softwares or tech conferences. Giant companies like Google, Uber, Netflix have been open sourcing some of their projects without worrying much about competitors taking advantages from those. Meaning, everyone in the world can see the source code and can use them.

Apart from that, they are not afraid to send their best engineers to speak at tech conferences, telling other people about awesome stuff they are doing. Putting company branding aside, they are something that I might call Collaboration over Competition.

Final Thoughts

The number tells that it is very difficult to be an individual that belongs to small percentage mentioned above, whatever the field is. The chance to be on the top level is not even 1%. Mathematically, it is easier to survive from any of these ten deadliest types of cancer for five years than being a professional at the very top level. However, I am hoping that whatever I wrote here doesn’t stop you to keep pushing yourself to be a better and competitive professional.