Crafting Your Career Path: A Guide to Aligning Your Purpose and Profession
What do I want to be when I grow up? This is a question many people struggle to answer, whether they're early in their careers or seasoned professionals. I’ve always said that work is exactly that—work. Otherwise, we would all call our careers “holidays.” That being said, it doesn’t mean you can’t have an incredibly rewarding career where you enjoy what you do and deliver value to your company and industry with great consideration, focus, and purpose. While there’s no one way to discover the direction you should choose, there are simple steps that can serve as signposts guiding your path.
The following four steps require quiet, honest reflection, followed by putting your thoughts down on paper—or for me, into OneNote.
What Are Your Non-Negotiables?
Often, when you apply for a role, it lists the level of flexibility you have to work various hours or travel. Early in your career, you may be more willing to do whatever it takes, but as time goes by, your personal priorities change. A great example of this recently played out when the UK Prime Minister publicly stated that he would try, “come what may,” to stick to a long-standing tradition of not working after 6 p.m. on a Friday. Read more.
This example underscores the importance of identifying what’s important to you and the values you want to stay true to. Early in my career, I enjoyed the idea of business travel, but as I became a father, I wanted to travel less and be at home. Now that my children are older, I’m open to business travel again. By the end of this process, you should have five or six key priorities and values that you can use as a guide when reviewing industries, companies, and roles.
If you’re having difficulty listing your values, try these tools:
VIA Survey: Looks at your character strengths, stemming from "Values in Action."
Values Card Exercise: Provided by the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT).
What Are You Good At?
While identifying a key ability, skill, or talent is crucial, it doesn’t always mean you should use it within your career. For some, a key area of enjoyment might be something they use to relax and switch off from work. I’m very good at analysing information and building spreadsheets, so I originally thought of becoming an accountant or a product manager. However, I realised I saw it as a means to an end, so I chose not to make it the main focus of my career.
Understanding what you’re good at provides a base you can build on and develop. Equally important is knowing what you don’t do well. Through this insight, you can work on developing these skills while also identifying roles that don’t align with your abilities. When reading a role description, the required skills are clearly articulated, so knowing your strengths helps both the recruiter and yourself.
At a high level, people can usually list a few things they are and aren’t good at, but for greater insight, consider these tools:
CliftonStrengths Assessment: Identifies your 34 strengths in order. Remember, these strengths don’t define your ability to succeed but help you appreciate your innate talents so you can lead with them.
360 Survey: I use the Genos Emotional Intelligence assessment to identify areas of strength and those needing development as part of my personal and career development plan.
What Do You Enjoy?
The more you enjoy your work, the less it feels like work and the more it feels like being paid for something fulfilling. It’s also important to know what you don’t enjoy, as these tasks drain your energy and make working feel like swimming through mud. Every career has its less favourable tasks, but if these are minimised by tasks you find enjoyable, you’ll be better positioned for success.
Finding joy and meaning in your role significantly elevates your productivity and increases your ability to operate in a state of Flow. If you aren’t familiar with Flow, think about an occasion when you’ve been so absorbed in a task that time flew by, and you were surprised by how long you’d been working. When I find my state of Flow, I often create outcomes I’m proud of, feel energised, and have a desire to continue the activity the following day.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TED Talk: Csikszentmihalyi's work on Positive Psychology identified the theory of Flow.
Write Your Future Biography
Perhaps the hardest task is projecting yourself into the future and writing what you’d like your biography to be. Imagine receiving a lifetime achievement award from your industry body. Think about how you’d like to be thought of by others, what you’ve achieved, and how you went about it. A variation of this exercise is drawing inspiration from a movie like "Jerry Maguire," where Tom Cruise’s character, a disillusioned sports agent, writes a Mission Statement on how the industry should be. This mission statement becomes the business model and journey for the character in the movie. While fictional, writing down your projected achievements can provide a powerful beacon for your career journey.
As a result of this four-step process, you can start to articulate what your career may look like and, just as importantly, what it won’t. Using the information you’ve captured, you’re now in a position to take the necessary actions to find the role best suited for you.
Create Your Job Description
Forget about the company and the role title at this stage. Instead, use your name, for example, “John Citizen Services” or “Jane Doe Incorporated,” and list your title as “Head of Productivity.” Now, you’re ready to complete the core elements you’d find in any advertised role on LinkedIn:
About the company and its values
Role overview
Key responsibilities
Qualifications and skills
What the company offers
Brainstorming
List all the roles you can think of that fit the job description you just wrote, then list all the industries where this type of role exists. You might be surprised. As you research the industries you identified, create a wish list of organisations that fit your criteria.
Networking
By now, you may be thinking, “Great, I’ve identified my values, non-negotiables, strengths, and the activities that energise me. But how do I take the next step to land the role or realise my projected biography and mission statement?”
Leverage LinkedIn to search for the desired role and company you want to work with and identify people who are already in these roles. By reviewing a few of these profiles, you can see what they studied and what experience they needed to progress to their current positions. If you have any 2nd-degree connections, see if they can introduce you; if not, reach out directly. Most people are open to helping others and are happy to have a call or even a coffee to share their insights. Many large organisations also promote mentoring and encourage their staff to give back. Personally, I always welcome the opportunity to mentor others by sharing my journey, and I enjoy talking to business leaders to aid in my continued development.
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