Don’t sweat the small stuff. Ironically it’s the small stuff we do focus our attention on. How often have we agonized over the mundane decisions in our lives? If you have found yourself staring at your closet this morning trying to decide what to wear, you’ve experienced this first hand. Our choice of clothes will have little effect on the outcome of our day. Our career choices on the other hand, can have a truly significant impact on the quality of our lives. After all, the average person spends between 33 and 50 per cent of their day at their job.
Despite this, when it comes to our careers and career choices, it is amazing how passive we can be. We often wait for opportunities to present themselves in the form of an advertisement or job posting. It is true that some opportunities come our way by chance. However, as Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favours the prepared mind” and so we should strive to prepare ourselves to make the most of our career.
Target setting is not the challenge. From an early age we begin to hone the answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up.” It is a robust, systematic approach to reaching that goal that is often absent. You won’t see a Fortune 500 company do this. Most Fortune 500 companies use strategic planning to develop the tactics it feels will make the organization successful in reaching its goals. It is an industry norm for a reason, it works. Why then could we not simply apply the same strategic planning principles to our career planning?
There are several different strategic planning processes, such as Situation-Target-Proposal and Draw-See-Think-Plan. These models all take the approach of looking at an organization’s current situation, its desired future state, and how it will get to that future state. When applying this process to your career planning, it can be simplified to:
A. Where you are
B. Where you want to be
C. How to get there
The first step involves conducting a situational analysis. This includes an internal look at your career (i.e., what stage you are at, education, experience) and an external view of the environment (employers, labour market trends, your peers). One method of analyzing this is to use a SWOT analysis, which involves plotting your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in a chart.
Next, you need to identify where you want to be. Typically in an organization this is articulated as the organization’s mission, vision and values.
A mission statement defines the fundamental purpose of an organization. It describes what the organization does.
A vision statement outlines what an organization wants to be or how it wants the world around it to be. It is a long-term, aspirational view.
Values are typically a shared set of beliefs which drive an organization’s culture and priorities.
Try applying these to yourself. If you were to develop a vision statement for your career, what would it look like? Imagine yourself in the future at a point in which you have achieved great career success. What have you accomplished? What does your life look like?
In his article, Creating a Career Vision for Your Life: Envisioning Your Ideal Career, Dr. Randall S. Hansen, author and founder of career development website Quintessential Careers, says, “A career vision statement is very much “big picture” thinking. It should be something you can aspire to and that should inspire you regardless of where you are now and the distance between the present and your vision.”
Do you want to change the delivery of laboratory services in Canada? Do you want to retire early and move to Europe? Or is your vision to simply pay the bills and spend more time with your family? Ultimately, it is up to you to decide the size and scope of your vision. What is important is determining what the end goal looks like. Dr. Hansen notes that, “by putting your vision into words, you begin to set in motion a process through which you will eventually achieve your goal.”
Consider your vision statement the destination of your career journey. Once you have that plotted, you can then set an appropriate course to get you there.
Articulating your values will help you decide what trade offs you will or will not make. Do you value career advancement, influence, money, work-life balance, flexibility? Look at what matters most to you and ask yourself if those values are in conflict with your vision statement. There are no right or wrong answers here. The exercise will simply get you thinking through what it will take to get to your goal and whether you are willing to take that journey before you embark on it.
With your mission, vision and values written down, it’s time to set forth a plan, or strategies, to reach your vision. One methodology of developing your strategies is to walk yourself through the following questions:
- What are the tangible things you would see if you were successful in reaching your goals?
- What obstacles are preventing you from realizing those things?
- What can you do to mitigate those obstacles?
In answering the second question you are really identifying gaps in your skills, education and experience that are standing in the way of you reaching your career goals. The answers to the third question are the strategies you can start putting in place, tangible actions you can take, to start filling in those gaps.
The individual strategies will be unique to each person. However, you will likely be looking at different types of professional development. For those moving from a role on the bench into leadership or roles outside of the lab, this will likely involve broadening your knowledge skill set. Formal education can help with this as well as more experiential learning opportunities such as volunteering and coaching and mentoring relationships.
In setting your strategies, remember the SMART principle. Keep them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Strategies should be specific in that it is clear what you are going to do. They should be measurable so you can track progress and confidently say when they have been completed. Your action plans need to be realistic and attainable given everything else on your plate. Factor in the other priorities you have in your life and make sure you aren’t setting yourself up for failure or burnout. The relevance factor helps keep you on track. When you come up with a strategy, ask yourself how it will help you reach your vision. If you can’t answer that question, the strategy isn’t relevant and you should devote more or less resources to pursing it. Finally, it is important that you set a timeframe for completing your strategies. It is far too easy, especially with your own development activities, to push action items to the backburner. How often do you hear the term “someday”? The truth is, someday never comes so if you really want to accomplish your plan, you need to set a timeframe. Put a stake in the ground and then head towards it. You may have to adjust your deadlines at some point but if you don’t have any to begin with, procrastination is just too easy a trap to fall into.
A typical strategic plan covers a three to five year period. Your career plan should do the same. That doesn’t mean you can’t have some longer term goals in mind. However, as Tracy Fedkoe aptly points out in her article, The Importance of Career Path Planning, “setting a plan longer than ten years is really not realistic because you need to take a look at this often and change it as your current situation personally and professionally changes.”
Now that you have spent time developing a strategic plan for your career, don’t let it just exist on a piece of paper somewhere. Keep it in a prominent place and revisit it at least once a year to see how you are tracking. Another idea is to create a visual depiction of your plan, often called a vision board. It is a great way to keep your goals top of mind.
Your career is important to you. You devoted a lot of time and money to starting your career. Once you are in your profession, don’t stop that investment. Plan your career like Apple, Google and Microsoft and you may just be as successful as they are.