I am often approached by people for career advice. Usually they’ve decided that they’re not learning anything or they don’t like the people that they work with and need a change. The first thing they do is update their resume and check job advertisements on internal company web sites or Monster.com. My advice to them is the same: figure out what you want to do. It goes far beyond identifying “the next job”. It’s figuring out what they want their life to be like and what’s important to them.
To really figure out what you need to do next, you need to know where you’ve been. Sit down and write out on a piece of paper what you’ve done in the past. What skills did you develop? What types of experiences have you had? This doesn’t necessarily mean what you’ve done at work, how about volunteer work, organizing and leading a cub scout den. There are many things we do just because we like to that are directly transferable to our career growth.
I’d like to stop here for a moment and discuss the importance of taking the time to write these thoughts down. If you don’t write them down, they don’t exist….period. I have people tell me that they’ve thought about these things and don’t need to go through this exercise. When you write them out, your thoughts change and take a different form. It is much easier for you to organize your thoughts in a disciplined way that will later come out during interviews. Your thoughts and ideas will be on the top of your head in a structured fashion that will impress future employers by your crisp and organized communications.
An excellent book on Career Planning
Once you’ve figured out what you’ve done in the past, write down what it is that you like doing. These items will begin to flesh out what your future jobs might be. Also, write down what your personal interests are, even if they aren’t job related. These interests might jog your creative thought process and help push you in a direction that you hadn’t thought of.
This process of self discovery will not happen in an hour. When I put together thoughts on my career I started an initial brainstorming using MindManager, a fantastic brainstorming tool that uses the concept of “Mind Mapping”. I revisited my Mind Map several times over a couple of weeks. I shared my thoughts with some of my mentors and they provided insights that I hadn’t thought of. I was building a picture of the product that I had to sell.
Once I had a very good idea of the marketable skills that I brought to the table, I started to think about the industries that I might like to work in and then identified companies within those industries that might be good to work for. You should develop a criteria that makes sense to you and fits your goals. These criteria might be the size of the company, the phase of the companies maturity, financials, job security. You should figure out what is important to you in a company and how you can tell that the company has what you need.
If you take the time to really map out what you’ve done in the past, what skills you have developed, what you would like to learn, and what you like to do, it will be much easier to begin drafting a resume targeted to the kind of work, industry, and company that you want to work for. You will be much more focused in what you want and have a firm understanding of why you are the best candidate. You’ll be surprised at how good it feels to talk about your career when you have a clear idea about what it is and what you would like it to become.
Step one… “If you don’t know what you want,” Ron said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”