Taking Ownership Over Your Career: 5 Steps to Creating a Roadmap
Whether you’ve just graduated and starting your first role or mid-career and looking to transition into a new field, there are important and intentional steps you can take to plan your career.
Women of colour and others from underrepresented groups often do not have the privilege, networks, and connections that can help kick start or advance their careers. Equipping women of colour with the tools and information needed to advance in their careers can give them a leg up, allowing them to navigate the workplace in more effective and impactful ways.
In this article, I share five steps to creating a career roadmap, ones that are based on my personal experiences and journey. They have helped me reflect, plan, and set myself up for success, and still continue to be useful tools that allow me to tackle my career with more agency. I hope they are helpful to you as well.
Illustration by Liu Liu
Step 1: Identify Your Values
Mapping your values is a good place to start when thinking of planning your career. Values are core principles that you believe in, embody, and practice daily that allow you to do the work you do. Your values are incredibly important to how you collaborate, lead, and show up in the workplace, for yourself, and for others. Defining your values will also help you evaluate the organizations and teams you want to work with, so you can detect deal breakers.
Examples of values include belonging, courage, growth, justice, progress, recognition, and quality. Keep in mind that values are determined by you! To reflect on your values, think about past experiences and the beliefs and behaviours that have served as a compass for you. Once you’re done with your list, highlight your top three core values.
Step 2: Identify Your Skills, Talents, and Expertise
Next, you want to map and track your skills. Essentially, you’re asking yourself: what do I bring to the table? What are my talents and expertise in my respective field?
Examples of skills include curiosity, innovation, intuition, resourcefulness, adaptability, and inclusivity. Use these as a starting point and an inspiration to generate additional skills that apply to you and where you’re at in your career. Include both hard skills as well as soft skills, making sure to include skills related to emotional intelligence. Often, these skills don’t just make you employable but will set you apart.
When doing this exercise, keep modesty at bay: the idea is to write down all the skills that you believe you possess that make you unique and valuable to your industry and the organizations within it. Finally, when you’re done with your list, highlight your top three core skills.
Step 3: Define Your Starting Point
To plan your career, you need to get clarity on what you want. And to get clarity on what you want, you need to define your point A. Take stock of where you’re at currently, and ask yourself: what is my starting point?
Keep in mind that although your starting point is relative to where you’re at in your career, it can also be an anticipated beginning. For example, your starting point can be a new job that you’ve begun, your current position in an organization, or a pending start to a whole new career. The important thing is to be honest with yourself and to identify a starting point that reflects where you are today and where you want to head in the future.
Step 4: Set Your End Goals
Now that you’ve defined your starting point, it’s time to think about your end goals. Ask yourself: what do I want to achieve in my career? What is the ideal desired outcome? In other words, what is your ultimate target or aspiration?
This step is a challenging one. Firstly, you’re not thinking about the next two years (although you totally can, especially if you’re early on in your career) but the next 10. Play the long game here and get really curious about what success means to you and what you want to prioritize in your career. Secondly, end goals are self-fueled and not external validation seeking. These are goals that cannot be taken away from you, so think about what you personally want to achieve in your career, not what is expected of you by external forces.
Finally, as a reminder, timeframes are not ingrained in stone, and you can choose a timeframe that works best for you, depending on where you are in your career. Naturally, end goals change, and that’s okay! Evaluate, revisit, and readjust as many times as needed.
Step 5: Create Action Items
Finally, it’s time to connect the dots between your starting point and your end goals. What are the stepping stones and requirements you need to set to reach your ultimate target? Here’s a simple framework to keep in in mind when creating action items:
Brainstorm a set of action items;
Group the ones that are related to one another;
Select the most imminent action items (I recommend aiming for 3-5);
Set a timeline for when you will complete each item.
Once you’ve completed your list of action items, share them with a close confidante, maybe a sibling, coworker, or mentor. Accountability is key! And lastly, keep your list somewhere visible. I like to keep mine on my whiteboard, but also on my computer, bookmarked for easy access.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this: what is one thing you can do in the next week or month to take ownership of your career?
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