kabarsula The anti-career ladder: 50 Degrees North CEO and NTIA winner Mari Rasanen on moving sideways bandar SLOT INDONESIA

We are taught to think of careers as ladders: start at the bottom, climb steadily upwards and whatever you do, don’t go backwards. 50 Degrees North CEO Mari Rasanen has built hers very differently.

“I look at my career more like a horizontal thing,” Rasanen told Travel Weekly. “A horizontal thing where I learn different things.”

It is a philosophy that has seen the Finnish-born CEO move between finance, IT, marketing and sales, relocate from Finland to Denmark and then Australia, and repeatedly swap seniority for the chance to learn something new.

In fact, Rasanen estimates she has started again three times in her life.

“I’ve kind of started from the scratch like three times, from the bottom, bottom ladder and just like climbing up,” she said.

When she arrived in Australia, Rasanen knew her finance experience could get her another job in the sector — but also knew it would likely mean going back to basic finance work she had already done.

“I was like, look, I’ve done enough of the basic finance things,” she said. “It doesn’t sparkle anything in me at the moment.”

So she changed careers instead.

Having studied IT and enjoyed it as a hobby, Rasanen decided to try it professionally, spending around two-and-a-half years in the industry before reaching another conclusion: “Yeah, not for me really.”

Rather than seeing that as time wasted, it became another piece of a career that would eventually make much more sense when viewed backwards.

Starting again while everyone else moves up

That willingness to move sideways did not mean Rasanen was immune to wondering whether everyone else was getting ahead.

She remembers looking at former colleagues and friends on LinkedIn and seeing what appeared to be their “perfect career paths”, while she was once again starting at entry level.

“You look at that and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, they are so amazing’,” she said. “And, you know, I’m just here starting all over again.”

But rather than focusing on the title attached to a job, Rasanen began asking a different question: what could she do with the opportunity she had?

“The curiosity is one thing, but I think that I have the ability to motivate myself and find the passion and find the purpose,” she said.

“So when I’ve been going back to the entry level, it’s just like: ‘Okay, so what can I do here? How can I make sure that I’m valuable?’”

Part of that attitude, she believes, comes from her Scandinavian background, where job titles can carry less weight.

“We don’t even kind of know sometimes what’s our title and we don’t really care too much about the title,” she said. “It’s what you actually do.”

From sales to the CEO seat

That mindset eventually brought Rasanen to 50 Degrees North.

After working for large companies, she was craving something different.

“I was totally fed up with big American giants and all that,” she said. “I wanted something small and more entrepreneurial because I always felt that that’s in me.”

She joined 50 Degrees North in sales when the team numbered just four people.

From there came sales management and leadership — Rasanen jokes there is “a little dictator in me” — before her finance background was suddenly needed again when problems emerged in the company’s finance department.

“I was like, well, I’ll go and do it.”

She spent around six years in finance before being encouraged to step up to CEO.

But even as she moved through senior roles, Rasanen resisted staying within the confines of a job description. She continued working at customer events and tour guiding, while also getting involved with everything from suppliers to pricing.

“I’m not picky,” she said. “I like the different things that I can do.”

Rather than deliberately leaving one discipline behind for another, she said, “other interesting opportunities have presented themselves”.

“And I’ve just been like, ‘Oh, why not? I’ll try that. I can always go back to finance or do something else if it doesn’t look like I like it’.”

It is, as Rasanen calls it, her “non-career plan”.

The skills you pick up sideways

Now in the CEO role, those career detours have become an advantage.

Rasanen said there was value not only in the work she performed in previous roles, but in observing how different organisations operated around her.

Her entry-level IT job in Australia, for example, was at Hewlett-Packard. Today, she can look back at how one of the world’s biggest companies approached its processes and communication and consider what a much smaller organisation can learn from it.

“So it’s not necessarily what I did there, but everything else that was around that,” she said.

The same applies to the different industries and disciplines she has experienced.

“One of the advantages of not having that kind of 30-plus years — although I sometimes kind of feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’m nothing, I’m no one in this industry, I know nothing about this industry’ — is the diversity,” she said.

“I’m not in this box thinking the same thoughts as everyone else. And there’s different ways of doing things.”

Her unconventional career has also given her exposure to work at almost every level.

“Suddenly, you’re in a position where you’re like, okay, now everything that I’ve learned and I’ve done and I’ve seen is actually useful now,” she said.

“Even the bad bosses and the good bosses and all the hard work and low-level stuff and high-level stuff.”
“I feel that I need all of them every single day.”

Learning from the bad bosses, too

Not all of those lessons were comfortable.

Rasanen said she has been lucky to work with some “really good leaders”, but believes her experiences with bad leadership have ultimately proved important too.

Before experiencing it herself, she struggled to understand stories from people who had been bullied at work or had lost their passion because of a manager.

“I didn’t understand why,” she said. “Why can one person, like a boss, kill all that passion in you?”

That changed when Rasanen experienced a leader who made her question herself.

“It’s so easy to say until you’ve experienced it, isn’t it?” she said. “Like that someone really pushes you down and makes you doubt yourself.”

The experience gave her a much clearer idea of the leader she did — and did not — want to become.

“When you’ve experienced it, then you’re like, okay, these are the traits I need to make sure I don’t do.”

For Rasanen, good leadership consequently starts with self-awareness rather than a prescribed management style.

“To know yourself makes you a good leader,” she said, arguing there are many different types of effective leaders and not every leader will suit every employee.

Rasanen, for example, knows she is not suited to managing someone who wants to be closely directed or micromanaged.

She also doesn’t want to surround herself with people who simply agree with her.

“I don’t want yes people around me,” she said. “I want people who have the courage to say no or challenge me.”

Looking sideways instead of up

There is an irony to Rasanen’s story. From the outside, moving from entry-level roles to the CEO of a travel company looks very much like a successful career trajectory.
Rasanen herself isn’t so convinced.

“I don’t feel that I have any career,” she said. “I’m just curious and I’m doing things that I’m just interested in.”

“I have never planned a career. The only plan that I’ve ever had is just to do something that I really like.”

Perhaps that is what makes Rasanen’s path particularly interesting. She has reached the top of the ladder without spending her working life staring at the next rung.

Instead, she kept looking sideways — at what interested her, what she could learn and where she could be useful.

And eventually, all those sideways steps added up.

This interview was brough to you as part of the Women in Travel series.

The Women in Travel Awards 2026 take place on Wednesday, 2 December at ivy Sydney. Buy your tickets here.

Key dates

Late Entries close: Friday 2 October
Early bird tickets close: Tuesday 3 November
Finalists announced: Wednesday 4 November
Awards night: Wednesday 2 December, The ivy, Sydney

Held at ivy Sydney, the December 2 ceremony will bring the industry together to celebrate the 2026 winners, unveil the Women in Travel Power List and crown the 2026 Woman of the Year.