Career : Build for skills

Ever been asked ‘What’s your 5 year plan?’ ‘What are your career goals?’ and all you feel like saying is ‘I forgot what I had for breakfast this morning, how do you expect me to know what life will be like next week, let alone next year, given that everything living and breathing in the world are also likely to be planning for the same thing : change’. How does one plan for that?

In a nut shell, don’t. Too many individuals try to start their career ambitions top down, start with the big idea, and try and make connections on the way down. Speaking with grads and team members, I have found that it is often easier to start with what we know and build our career plan : bottom up.

Here are some frameworks that I have used with my team and mentees to re-frame their way of looking at a career plan.

1. Understand your place in the team. Do a SWOC (based on SWOT) analysis on your role and skills within the team ; what are your strength, your weaknesses, your opportunities for growth and challenges to growth. Where can your manager or others help you succeed (opportunities) and where can we provide guidance. This is an easy exercise to understand our role in our ‘micro’ environment.
2. Understand your place in the organization. Do another SWOC analysis but this time consider yourself as part of a wider organization. What strengths do you bring to the organization, what are your weaknesses/areas of development and what are your opportunities and challenges to achieving growth
3. List your skills. Go ahead and list all of your skills, once completed, go through and colour code them in to ; skills I enjoy expressing, and , skills I don’t enjoy expressing as much. It’s worthwhile noting which skills give us energy vs those that don’t. It’ll also give us direction where we’d like to take our career — ensuring we land a role that allows us to express as many skills we enjoy as possible, whilst being mindful that that role may still require us to express some lesser ‘enjoyable’ skills too
4. Theme your skills. Do your skills have common themes? Can you place them within a ‘strategy bucket’ ‘marketing’ ‘stakeholder management’ etc. This will give you a better idea about your strengths and translating those into career prospects. Working with someone to create themes can help in seeing your skills from a different angle.
5. Role Scoping. Understand which roles are available that allow you to express your ‘favoured’ skillset. What skills are you missing?
6. Create Career Goals. These will be partially based on your skill gap and the skills you enjoy expressing.
7. Create a Career Mission. Combine your goals into one sentence. This will embody what will drive you to achieving your goals
8. Create a Career Vision. By achieving your goals, and accomplishing your career mission, where will it lead you? That should be your career vision.

This approach has worked well for me, and for those I have coached in teams. Would love to hear what you thoughts.

Basic model in Google Sheets here