May Busch recalls her career was just meandering along until somebody pointed that out and she realised she was in need of a career game plan.
What comes to mind when somebody asks you the question: “How’s it going?”
If you’re like most people, this question makes you think about something in your personal life, maybe your health or the project you’re working on, or your work overall.
Very few of us think of this question in terms of our career. As in: “How is my career going?”
So, let me ask you that — how is your career going?
Our careers take up a lot of our time, energy and mind space; our careers are always putting us somewhere between fulfilment and frustration.
So the question is: Where are you right now on that spectrum? Which end are you closer to?
More importantly, if we roll the clock forward three to five years, what will the answer be if you don’t do anything differently?
I wish somebody had asked me this question earlier on in my career.
I didn’t fully consider it until someone finally said to me: “You know looking at your career, May, you are having an amiable career.”
It wasn’t a compliment.
I took it to mean that up to that point I’d been meandering around and basically doing whatever I was asked to do.
In fact, I used to say to my managers: “Just put me where you need me. I want to make sure that I’m serving the firm.”
While I definitely served the firm and learned a lot up to that point, my career wasn’t necessarily heading where I wanted it to.
I needed to come up with a career game plan.
I went to work creating one that helped me to find my footing.
Once I did that, everything started to click for me at work.
I started to find myself in situations where I was using my best strengths, which is important in order to be super-successful and to fulfil your potential.
That’s also generally when we’re in flow and feeling good about ourselves.
Not only was I delivering value, I also felt valued by the firm.
The exact way you create your career game plan can vary but the most important thing is that you have one. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Here are five characteristics of an effective career game plan.
Time Frame:
You want your game plan to encompass a short enough time frame that you have some actionable steps to take in the near term.
It also needs to be long term enough that you can make sure you get where you ultimately want to go.
Scope of Your Career Game Plan:
For me, I wanted to incorporate my entire life in to my game plan and not just my work.
Our careers take up a lot of our lives, so we want to make sure that our entire lives are in sync with our careers and vice versa.
Within that scope I like to focus particularly on my professional aspirations.
Flexibility:
Your career game plan needs to be able to morph and change as you learn and grow.
That means giving yourself permission to make adjustments as you revisit your game plan.
It also means embedding some milestones or signals that let you know when you’re going off track so you can ‘flex’ the plan or adjust what you’re doing.
Honesty:
This is about how you fill in your career game plan.
It needs to be about your life, your future, your professional aspirations, and not what your family members, your boss, or society tells you is the ‘right’ thing.
Living Document:
Your career game plan needs to be a living document.
By this I mean that you need to be able to print it out and keep it somewhere where you can see it.
This makes it more likely that you’ll use it, refer to it, work with it and update it regularly.
It should be one, or at most two pages long.
*May Busch helps leaders and their organisations achieve their full potential. She works with entrepreneurs and managements to build their businesses and can be contacted at [email protected] .
This article first appeared on May’s blogsite
