Annual Career Check-up

It's almost April. Where are you with your career goals for the year? Have you set them yet? It's time to take stock of your career and job. Sure, you can use the traditional "Annual Review" process, but that tends to fit a pre-determined format that may not meet you where YOU are in advancing or changing careers. Annual reviews are also often limited because:

1. Annual reviews tend to be focused upon your performance on a job you may or may not actually care about.
2. Career ladders and promotions are focused on limited opportunities within an organization or companies.

In addition, it's difficult to get solid, objective feedback from the people you work with. Research has shown that once humans make an initial impression, we seek data to support our impression (Hamilton & Sherman, 1994). We don't do so well taking into account data that challenges a position we already hold. Making your career choices dependent upon some one's subjective opinion of you can be a recipe for future problems when you find yourself in a new organization or sidelined by a surprise lay-off.

You should do a "Career Checkup" each year in a job and ask yourself (or your partner):

1. What marketable skills did you learn last year? If you didn't learn anything, is that because of a dead-end job or lack of motivation on your part? Be honest. How do you know those skills are marketable?
2. What marketable skills are you going to learn this year? How will you do that? What books will you read? What talks will you attend? What will you try?
3. Where is your current job heading in terms of new opportunities and new skills? I was talking to a friend recently who decided to leave his job because he couldn't see what he would learn in the next year. That's a bold move, but it paid off almost immediately when he began learning new technologies and increased his responsibilities.
4. Where can you best use your new skills? Will someone pay you more or give you more opportunities to stretch yourself at a new company? 

After your self-assessment, you should be able to clearly articulate what you learned last year, what you're going to learn this year, and how you're going to learn these things. Write it down. Talk about it with someone close to you.


Next time we'll talk about making your plans into reality.

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Hamilton, D.L. & Sherman, J.W. (1994). Stereotypes. In R.S. Wyer, Jr., & T.K. Srull (Eds.)

Handbook of Social Cognition (2nd Ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1-68). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.