Building your career is a series of small steps

Don't worry about 10 years from now.

Next Step Navigator is a career newsletter mixing real talk with real advice to help you tackle the job hunt and carve out your own unique path. It’s like grabbing a coffee with a mentor who shares stories and strategies to boost your confidence and guide you towards making strategic, meaningful career moves.

If you’ve ever been asked by a friend, colleague, interviewer or other person in your life, “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” and didn’t have an answer, I think that’s…..okay!

The labour market is changing so fast it’s hard to predict what jobs will exist 5, 10 or 20 years from now.? Sure, we have research reports and trend forecasting, but where does that leave the average job seeker who’s looking to build their career now, in the present???

Let’s instead consider the immediate future.? What do you hope to happen in 3 months?? The next 6 months?? I feel strongly that your ability to do great work, find your next job or build an amazing life is not contingent on knowing exactly where you want to be in the future - it’s contingent on being able to move forward in the present.

You can’t predict the future, but you can plan for one, next, tiny, career move.? If you have a grand vision for your career - that’s awesome!? Go after it!? But if having to have a grand plan makes you feel paralyzed, scared or adrift, you’re in good company.

I say leave the future for the future and focus on what you can do now.? Your career is built in a series of small, deliberate steps.

Here’s an example:??

You’re in a role you don’t love - the pay isn’t great, you don’t feel supported by leadership and you feel that you’ve learned as much as you can in this position.? You’re not sure exactly what you’d like to do next, but you know you feel ready to move on.? Moving on to something else doesn’t require knowledge of the destination - it just requires one next step.

So that small next step could be:

• Use LinkedIn to find alumni of your postsecondary program and take a look at the career paths of fellow grads
• Research the salaries of similar roles in other industries
• Create an up-to-date inventory of your current job responsibilities, accomplishments, skills and other wins
• Make a list of your values to help clarify what you might like to see in a future workplace/role (i.e community oriented, ethical, job security, etc.)
• Create and answer some reflective questions:What kind of problems do you want to solve?What kind of impact do you want to have?How do you want to spend your time?
• Take a favourite job task or skill and use that as a search term on a job board to see what comes up (i.e. if you love creating training workshops, try searching “training” or “workshop facilitation”)
• Sign up for a newsletter from a professional association in your field
• Look up labour market information about your field (or others) using Job Bank or the Labour Market Information Council
• Create a list of practical details that you need to consider for a next job (location, salary range, benefits, accessibility, hours)

Notice that none of these actions require knowledge of your next destination - they just require a desire to move and a curiosity about what could be next.? And once you start, you’d be surprised at where the forward momentum will take you.? Think of the snowball rolling downhill!

A story from my own career journey:

I knew I wanted to leave the world of small non profits - I had worked in that space for almost a decade and was looking for better pay, more stability, professional development opportunities and roles with less built-in ‘scope-creep’.

I started by researching industries where I might find those conditions of work.? Notice that I wasn’t immediately looking for open positions to apply for or trying to define future job titles.? I identified why I wanted to leave (push factor) and what might draw me to a new role (pull factor - more on that later!).??

I defined one, small action - get onto Google and start researching industries with more stability, better pay, professional development opportunities and defined roles.? That search led me to higher education.? Once I had that focus, only then did I start researching where my skills might transfer as I contemplated making that leap.

I didn’t have to know the destination to start the journey - you can build the plane while flying it. (A mixed metaphor, maybe, but it applies!)

When you’re overwhelmed - make it smaller.? Make one, tiny decision and let the momentum move your forward.

Have you ever felt stuck? Are you future minded or live in the present?? Let me know and share this with a friend!

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