Chart Your Path: Step 1

"4 Steps to Making Your Career Plan Work for YOU

"Who are you?"

January 7, 2025

When it comes to your career, you’re in charge. You can’t rely on others to do it for you. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re transitioning into a higher-level role, one thing will always be true: your career development is in your hands. But as your career shifts and matures, how do you chart a path that aligns with both your professional aspirations and personal values?

Let’s meet Ahmed, who faced this situation recently after his latest promotion:

It had been just two weeks since Ahmed’s promotion to manager – something he had worked hard for, envisioned for years – and yet, the weight of it felt different than he expected. It was a bit overwhelming. With his new role came not just added responsibilities, but the realization that career goals were shifting. He had reached a milestone… now what?

Where did he want to go from here, and how could he ensure that his personal life didn’t take a backseat to his career ambitions, or that his personal goals weren’t distracting him from achieving his career goals?

Ahmed wanted to push himself to grow in his new role, to become the kind of manager who developed others and contributed meaningfully to the company. But he had seen other new managers go “all in” and quickly burn out. His mentor warned him that going too hard, too fast, without balancing the other parts of his life would hurt him in the long run. Ahmed didn’t want to wake up one day feeling like his personal aspirations had been sidelined. He wasn’t sure what really mattered to him at this point.

There’s a strategic approach to defining, refining, and actively pursuing your career goals and aspirations while having them sync up with your personal life goals. There are four parts to this approach, and taking the time to complete each one is a great investment in you. Over the next 4 posts, we will dive into each step.

Step 1. Lay the Foundation: Pre-Work Before Setting Your Goals

Before you start defining your goals, take some time for self-reflection. Don’t skip this step! Your career plan is a product of who you are, what you value, where you’ve been, and where you want to go.

The key is to write down the answers to the following questions so you can revisit your answers from time to time later. This exercise will lay a foundation for the other parts of your Career Plan.

Your Experiences: Reflect on your past roles. Which one was your favorite? Why? What went well? Which one did you like the least? Why? What didn’t go well?
Learning from past experiences will help you make smarter decisions moving forward.
Your Current Situation: What’s the best part of your current role? What don’t you like? What new skills have you mastered? What skills do you want build, but don’t have an opportunity to build in this role?
These questions will help you understand what’s working and where the gaps are.
Your Strengths and Weaknesses: Throughout your past and current roles, what strengths have you developed? Where are areas for improvement? You may want to revisit your last few performance reviews or talk to your mentor for inspiration.
Think of this as a self-audit. Be honest with yourself.
Your Values: What drives you? What is your biggest motivator? What don’t you care as much about?
Everyone is motivated by different benefits, whether it’s financial security, making an impact, achieving work-life balance, or increasing scope of responsibilities.

This work is about creating a strong base for your career plan. Your values are going to inform the next step. This will ensure that your plan is about you and is completely aligned to your experiences, values, ambitions and goals.

Call to Action

We’ve created a set of tools at each step for you to write your Career Plan. I recommend finding a place to save all steps of your career plan so you can revisit it as often as you need. Maintain it somewhere that makes it easy for you to look back on previous versions so you can see you far you progress.

Set aside the right amount of time to reflect on you… where you’ve been and what you’ve learned
Open the first tool: Planning Foundations and answer the questions
Put it away for at least 24 hours
Come back and review and revise your answers

You’re now ready for Step 2.