One of my favorite activities is facilitating career planning conversations with team members. As a general rule of thumb, we focus on long-term career planning at least once a year while observing progress on a monthly basis. This article describes the career planning process I use when working with teams. It boils down to 8 easy steps.
Before getting to the steps, I would like to offer up a sailing metaphor to make career planning more tangible. When thinking about career planning, envision yourself, the captain of your career, charting a course over a vast ocean of possible career directions. There are limitless destinations on the horizon. Some are closer in proximity and time. Others will require you to gain more skill and experience before you dock.
As a captain, you have a choice to take a backseat to life's eddies and simply drift into a corner or, you can take command of the wheel and navigate your path with intention and foresight. I hope you choose the latter.
1. Take Command
Whether you are just starting out in your career or are well on your way, if you have not taken the time to think about the future of your career, do not wait. Do it now.
2. Map Your Destinations
As your first step, map what you want to do in 1, 3, 5 and 10 years time. Envisioning your future can be challenging, especially if you have not done it before. So here are some recommendations.
For each time horizon, try to think of more than one possible outcome. Perhaps you are a designer and love to do hands-on design, but are also interested in creative direction or design management. Perhaps you have a passion outside the realm of design—maybe you want to go into a career as an architect, or perhaps you want to teach. Include these future intentions too.
Also, think about the companies you would like to work for. Are you inclined towards the intimacy of smaller companies, like a start up? Or is your goal to work at a large company like Google or Facebook?
Think of each career goal as a unique destination in your life's ocean. By listing out these goals, you have started your career map.
3. Ready Your Resources
For your next step, understand what skills and experiences are needed to be ready for each destination on your career map.
What is the difference between skills and experience? Skills are things you can do. They can be hard skills—like mastering the art of product planning or designing useful journey maps. Or they can be soft skills—like speaking confidently in public or developing active listening techniques.
Experiences, on the other hand, are the times you have put your skills to the test. Say you are a confident public speaker. Your experience might be to have presented in front of your product team, your company, or at a conference of strangers. Or say you are an amazing designer. Your experience might be to have independently led the design of a new feature, or perhaps you identified a big business opportunity and convinced your entire product team to do it.
Typically, as you progress throughout your career you will increase your breadth and depth of skill, and employ these skills on ever more challenging problems to gain experience.
4. Research
Refer back to your map. Do you have a good understanding of what skills and experiences are necessary to prepare yourself for your future destinations? If you do not, find people who are currently in the roles you have mapped as your destinations. Reach out to them. Interview them to understand what it takes for them to be successful doing what they do. Learn about their career path. Learn about what important skills and experiences they gained in order to get where they are today.
This research will help you in two ways. First, you will learn first-hand about the destinations you have selected for your career map. You may find that some are more exciting or relevant to you personally, some not so much. Second, you will learn what skills and experiences are required to do the jobs you want to do in the future.
Incidentally, if you choose to directly interview people there is a third benefit to this research—networking. If you make a good impression on the people you interview it may pay dividends down the line.
5. Refine and Chart
Now that you have done your research, refine your map if necessary, and then make a list of what skills and experiences are needed to be ready for your mapped destinations. I like to chart this out in a spreadsheet but you can also draw these onto your map if you prefer to make it more visual.
The list of skills and experiences you have created should provide insight into where you need to grow. You may find the same skills and experiences are needed to be ready for different destinations. That is great. It means that if you master those skills and experiences, you will prepare for more than one destination.
However, even with skill overlap, if you are like me, you have created a long list that would take years—perhaps even a lifetime—to accomplish. So naturally, the next step is to prioritize and focus.
6. Prioritize and Focus
The goal in this step is to determine how to spend your time in a way that most efficiently maximizes your opportunity to be ready for the future. First, consider the range of destinations you have created on your map. Which are the most important to you now? If you were to chart your ideal path from today, to 3 years, to 5 and then 10, what path would fulfill you the most, now? The skills and experiences needed to accomplish that path should take top priority.
After you have done this, take a step back and identify whether those same skills and experiences apply to other destinations—even if only in part. No action is needed at this point—just make a note for future reference. If in the future your priorities change, you can come back to your map to understand how the skills and experiences you have developed apply to alternative destinations.
7. Decide and Act
Today, right now, you are in a role at a company that requires you to exercise existing skills, learn new skills, and that provides you with opportunities to take on new experiences. Do these skills and experiences line up with those you have listed as most critical on your map?
If so, excellent. You are very fortunate. And you are likely in the minority.
It is more likely you will find that in your current role you are spending time on skills and experiences unlikely to contribute to your first destination. In this case it is your responsibility to identify whether you can realistically change this in your current job. This is an excellent conversation to have with your manager. Share your map with them and help them understand how you are thinking about your career. If your manager cares about your career path, they will welcome this conversation.
Next, identify what new skills or experiences you can take on that align with those you have identified on your map. At Google, Uber, and Airbnb I have seen—and helped—designers and researchers alter their charters to attain their goals. In some cases, designers have switched roles to become researchers. I have helped researchers and designers become Product Managers. And I have helped a Product Manager become a Designer. It is good business to help smart, motivated people attain their career goals without needing to leave your company.
However, in some cases your company's culture or the range of available roles will not provide you the opportunity to take on the skills and experiences you seek. I have found two ways to approach this.
First, you can seek opportunities outside work. There are many great resources to grow your skill set—coding bootcamps, data science programs, design courses, Toastmasters clubs for public speaking practice and team leadership. The opportunities outside of work to grow your skills are nearly endless.
For the even more ambitious, you may want to consider moonlighting—allocating time before or after your regular working hours to a job with real responsibilities and deliverables that allows you to practice the skills and gain the experiences you seek.
8. Update and Maintain
Now you have your career map and know what is needed to sail forward. You have taken steps to adjust where you allocate your time and energy in order to gain the skills and experiences needed to sail on the best course. Congratulations, you have taken control of your future.
But your duties as a captain are not over. As you sail into the future, as you grow new skills, experience new events, conquer new challenges, and experience new major life events—like marriage, home ownership, becoming a parent, caring for a parent—take note of how your career goals shift and change.
As a rule of thumb I try to update my map every year. It is a great way to account for what I have learned over the past year, assess the relevancy and importance of my career goals moving forward, adjust if needed, and then plan which skills and experiences I need to gain.
Happy sailing!