Understanding the rise to political power is a central aim in the study of politics. Prior political and communicative experience are widely recognized to play a key role in the recruitment for influential positions like ministerial offices. Previous research, however, has largely examined prior experience with aggregated figures and career snapshots or derived theoretically-based typologies of career pathways. We use detailed monthly data on the complete pre-parliamentary political and professional career pathways to parliament of all Dutch MPs (N=1,263) from 1945 to 2012 over 22 parliamentary cohorts. Engaging in sequence analysis with fuzzy clustering, we empirically derive eight unique career types in both domains. Using this detailed conceptualization of prior experience to predict the obtainment of ministerial offices we find national political experience to play a pivotal role whole communicative experience does not. We furthermore find that requirements have changed, shifting from military and teaching experience to private sector experience.
