reco (our version of a quick tip): Find someone on LinkedIn that has a career path you’re interested in emulating and ask them how they got to their current role, be specific with your follow-up questions.
Career pathing starts first and foremost with understanding yourself and where your passions lie. Couple this with what you’re skills are and you’ll have a good idea of the type of work you would like to do, but now you need to do some research on what are actual job positions that align with both.
The great thing about today’s world is that your access to information is truly unlimited and whatever industry and the specific job you’re curious about you can probably find documentation to help you learn more about it.
Try the following exercise to help you narrow in on career path opportunities:
- Know yourself
- Discover options
- Identify Skill Gaps
- Repeat.
Know yourself
It’s easy to say that you know yourself, after all, who will know you better than you. Although that may be true spending time thinking about all dimensions of yourself helps to categorize what you would enjoy doing for a living and what’s just a hobby that you would rather keep that way.
Once you’ve done enough thinking about it, write it down. You’ll want to have a list of skills and passions to reference as you explore the jobs market and start to find roles that line up with what you’re looking for.
As an entry-level professional, when writing your skills and passions focus be sure to include anything and everything as your first and second job will have a huge impact on the rest of your career trajectory and you want to make sure that you’ve explored all options.
As an experienced professional, you can be a bit more granular with your skillsets as by now you’ve developed expertise in key places. However, one thing you can do differently is to include past jobs and the skills and passions you had along the way so you can identify trends that might help you map out future positions.
Discover options
The best way to see what’s out there is to pretend to be on the job hunt. You’ll want to reference the following sites to help find roles that align with what you’ve written down:
As an entry-level professional, you should start your search by finding companies that first line up with your passions and then explore their career websites to find jobs in the skill areas you thrive in.
As an experienced professional, you can be a bit more granular with your search and can use your past career moves to find people who have trailblazed for you on LinkedIn.
Identify skill gaps
Once you’ve found job descriptions and/or people with career paths you’d like to emulate, you can now identify the skills you need to get there. There are several templates out there that can help with this but we believe that keeping it simple is best (see below).
You will want to write down the skill gaps you see, write down the actions you’re going to take to fill those gaps, and determine the next steps you’re going to take to make sure you’ve solidified those gaps as strengths.
This template works for all professionals and is an easy way to keep you accountable to your own growth.
Repeat.
You’ll find that if you take initiative and really execute on the actions you say you’re going to do, you’ll start to build out a better resume for yourself. You will not only align with the job descriptions and people that you found, but you’ll be better suited for a slew of even more opportunities as companies are always on the lookout for people who constantly self-improve.
Although these steps might seem simple in nature, the follow-through is what makes them impactful. You can leverage these tips at any point in your career, and in fact, should repeat the process any time you feel that your growth has plateaued. The world we live in is ever-growing, with new technologies and new skills that come along with them, you need to be ever-growing with it so that your career can continue to grow.
Check out the resources below for more links on how to better plan your career path:
- Article — How to Make a Career Plan in 8 Steps (Indeed)
- Article — 3 Steps To Develop Your Career Plan (Forbes)
- Video — Apple CEO Tim Cook on Career Planning (YouTube)
If you’re looking for personalized career coaching that is simple and affordable, please sign-up for our waitlist at hellorees.com.
