January is the month when the majority of people with a career crisis finally confront it. It happens every year. For some reason the combination of fireworks, Auld Lang Syne and the realisation that another birthday is looming, seems to be the permission required to search for the next challenge.
I had lunch recently with a woman that I mentor and I could sense she was building up to a new year career reassessment. She’d been telling me for a while that she has outgrown her role. I asked her what she sees herself doing in five years time. She couldn’t answer me as she hadn’t ever thought about it. We discussed the need for her to develop a career plan. Without one she risks making the wrong next move. With a clear plan, it’s much easier to determine the next best step.
I have always had a plan. As a teenager I set myself the initial career goal of becoming editor of Dolly magazine. Five years later when I achieved that goal I fairly quickly set the next goal: to edit ELLE Australia. It took eight years for me to get there. It was also far from a direct route with a number of roadblocks. When I was informed that the job was out of my reach, potentially forever, I thought long and hard about what I would need to do to change that. The onus was on me to make myself the obvious choice for my desired job. I took three different jobs in between, which I viewed as strategic stepping stones. Before moving between jobs I assessed the likelihood of each role helping me to reach my goal. There were times when the role I went for was deemed more important than the potential for a salary jump, and other times when the company or product was worth the compromise over job title.
Goals that followed my appointment as editor of ELLE were: publisher (tick), senior management role in a medium other than print (hence my move from magazines to digital), and CEO.
Having clear goals helped me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. But my goals haven’t necessarily been linear, and they haven’t always been self-generated. For the past decade I have had a long-term plan bubbling alongside a series of shorter term goals. I signed up for the Australian Institute of Company Directors course in 2003, after the MBA I had just completed got me dreaming about a future second career in corporate governance as a non-executive director. Discussions with board recruiters over the years confirmed that one of the surest paths to boards if you are a woman is via the CEO route. So here I am.
My career goals have been devised around a variety of factors, including:
- Passion: it’s vital to love what you do because you spend so much of your time doing it.
- A career SWOT analysis: know what you are good at and advance your career in that direction.
- Market conditions: be aware of industry trends and make your move on your terms, before you are forced to.
- Experience: every time you make a move, learn from the experience.
- Timing: as the saying goes, timing really is everything so be ready to take advantage of opportunities when they arise.
- Advice: seek guidance on your next step from a mentor or career expert. Their perspective can be invaluable.
If you are keen to take your next career step after the end of the year, think about what you eventually want to do with your life first so that you embrace change for more than just the sake of it.