Are you new to career planning or are you sick of using templates that don't
actually help you achieve your career goals? In this video,
I'm going to be sharing with you the career success process that actually works.
Stay tuned...
Welcome back to my channel where I help you slay your career and create
the successful life that you deserve. Subscribe for weekly doses of the best career
advice out there. I've been through the useless snoozefest process that is annual
career planning at most organizations. You know the one, you usually sit down with
your manager once a year, and together you define the things that you're going to work on.
Usually, it's oriented towards the goal for the company, or in most cases actually
oriented towards improving yourself. So you're finding the thing that you're least good at,
and you're creating goals to actually change that thing. The thing is, once you actually
create this plan, it usually gets put into a file somewhere on your computer, or if you're old
school, a physical location, and you never look at it again until one year later, when it comes
to annual review time. And then what usually happens is you have a good laugh,
either just to yourself, or with your manager about how hilariously off the mark all of those
goals and intentions were. And in fact, you realize that you didn't make any progress on the
things that you intended to make progress on it all.
The process that I'm going to share with you is about setting intention,
and structure into actually achieving what you want to in your career.
So whether you're looking to get a promotion, transition into a new role, or become an
authority within your industry, this career success plan is going to help you get exactly there.
And you're going to use it on a regular basis.
And it's actually going to be one of the most useful tools that you create for yourself.
This is actually a sample of what I do with my clients in my Career Accelerator.
But this is so important that I really want every ambitious professional to have it, and hence,
I'm sharing the process with you today. And make sure that you watch all the way to the
this video because if you do and you want to dive in deeper, I have a free tool available for you.
Step one is begin with the end in mind. This is actually one of the principles of the
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And if you have not read the book, I highly recommend
it to every professional, I'll actually drop a link in the comments down below.
Or you can just go on Amazon and find it.
huge benefit of beginning with the end in mind is if you start where you are, you're not
always sure of where you want to go and the steps required to get there. However,
if you've defined your career vision, you know where your ultimate destination is. Now
you can actually reverse engineer the steps and milestones in order to get you there,
which we're going to do in this process. If you watched my last video, and you've already
created your career vision, you have this step 50% squared away, if you didn't go and
watch that video and come back here because it is going to provide the foundation.
Now there's one more thing that I do recommend that you include, though it is actually
optional in your career success plan. And that is defining your values who you want to
be as you make this ascent through your career. And this is actually getting a little bit
into having a professional mission statement or a personal mission statement.
And the reason that I love having this combination of your values and your vision is it's
really going to help you not just set the milestones that you need to follow in order to reach
your destination. It's also going to help you when we get into the points where you're
planning out the specific tasks in order to get you there. Because who you want to be, your
strengths, and who and how you want to be known really plays a critical role in creating the
right plan to get there. And having the right plan in place is really the differentiator between
the plan that you use, and the one that ends up in the file being absolutely useless.
Step two is defining your success metric, how are you going to know when you've actually
achieved this goal metrics really matter? Having some sort of quantifiable or as qualitatively
clear as possible objective that you're actually working towards is going to help in creating the
steps of the success plan. There is one caveat here and this is where a lot of my clients actually
struggle to find clarity. There's one thing that I encourage you to do, and that is to be
specifically non specific. What does that mean? Well, the thing is, if you're - especially thinking
about your levels - a job title can be a generally ambiguous thing. Your job title at a different
company might have completely different connotation. And also, if you're navigating between
different sizes of companies, there may be different levels that map together within those
based on where you're actually at. One of the mistakes that I actually personally made in
my career success plan and my five year vision was that I had a level that I had assigned to
make it easy for me to think about, and to talk about the level that I wanted to be at. However,
what actually ended up happening is, when I achieved this level, I completely wasn't aware of it.
And the reason I wasn't aware is because I had assigned a title that didn't map exactly to the
title in my vision. Now, luckily, it didn't take me completely off path or end a high level of
frustration over several years for me. But it did actually lead me on a path to try to achieve
something that I had actually already achieved. And I think that I could have done so much
more back in my corporate days, if I had realized that I'd already hit the goalpost that I
was aiming to head and made the decision to actually transfer transition to entrepreneurship,
which is what my vision actually was to do once I reached that level.
Or if I wanted to settle into corporate life a little while longer, because it was so beneficial
for preparing me for entrepreneurship, that maybe I was interested in going one level higher,
because the steps to get between those two, actually very slightly.
What does this actually mean for you? If you're setting any goals, in terms of level described
them both in the title that you were designed based on your understanding of the role where
you are right now, as well as putting a description of what that it looks like. For example,
if your goal is to be a Director, you may choose to put into your vision and your milestones
that you want to reach the director level, but also qualify that you want to be managing
managers - because you could be a senior manager at a large organization with much higher
scope than a director at a smaller company. You see what I'm saying? However, having
a level and the general framework to discuss your goals is really important. So be able to
map to both of those things. But also be able to qualify where you're at, this is going to
help you in the conversations with the people that are going to help get you there.
But it's also going to help you realize when you've actually achieved your vision.
trust me, that's a celebration you do not want to miss.
Step three is to set milestones. Does your career vision kind of scare you? If you have big
hairy audacious dreams for yourself and really want to go far in your career, it can feel really
far away from where you're at, you can kind of feel like you're sitting down and being
told to eat an elephant. So how do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time, of course.
And the milestones are going to be what actually helps break this down into bite sized
pieces for you. Let's follow our example of the vision of being a director that I mentioned
in the last step. So let's say that your five year career goal is to become a director so you
put a label to it. But you've also described what that actually looks like. Now what you can
do is actually set the milestones in order to get there. So just for the purpose, of example,
most people if you work in tech, are looking at getting a promotion every 18 to 24 months.
That would be average to a little bit fast. And the duration is going to take longer the higher
you get up the ladder. So let's say that your company, that's the benchmark that you're
looking against, because that seems to be the trajectory of the people that are getting
promotions. So you want to actually back up from there.
If you want to be a director, you probably need to be promoted to say, a senior manager,
24 months in. So that's two years in advance. So your three year milestone is to get that
promotion to senior manager. Let's say that you're just a consultant right now. So there's
still another step there is becoming an actual manager. So what you do, again, using our
18 to 24 month benchmark, let's say that your goal within the next 18 months is a milestone.
Within the next 18 months is to be promoted to manager. This makes it so much more achievable
when you see that it is actually just simple steps at reasonable timelines. Now, if your goal
is to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in the next five years, but you have actually
just started and you're a new graduate, this might not actually work so well for you.
You do want to base this in reality, of course. But do base it in an aggressive reality,
because when you are someone who is focused, determined and exceptional, the aggressive
timelines that you set for yourself, are going to be ones that, in general, you're going to be
able to achieve. And this doesn't just apply to any promotions that you actually want to map
towards. This applies to all sorts of career goals. So let's say that you're working towards
getting a certification or you eventually want to go and moonlight to do your MBA.
Once again, you can back them the steps that you need to actually achieve that goal
into your plan and set them as milestones in the plan. So that you have a timeline of where
you need to be and when you need to be there. And this is going to help immensely when
we get into step four.
And step four is to create the actual task in order to achieve the plan.
While you'll have your milestones, generally for your 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, you don't need to plan
all of your tasks against five years. There is just way too many variables that you cannot
control or you don't have accurate visibility of at this point in time. So investing time into
actually planning out all of the steps for you to become a director or VP, or an industry
expert just doesn't make sense. However, the next year, you do have enough visibility that
you can actually anticipate the things that you generally need to do, especially within
the next six months. So your focus is going to be on that. However, in the plan, you still want
to make sure that the milestones to achieve those big goals, the big outcomes according to
your vision are outlined, this is going to keep your visibility there. So as you actually
generate the tasks that lead to your micro milestones, they're all going to be there and
it's going to help keep them front of mind because you were going to have a visual on
them regularly. Now what you should do for your next year is outline the milestones that need
to be hit and the next 12, six, three, and one month period of time. So let's say that we are going
with the goal of becoming a speaker at a conference. So let's say that your 12 month milestone
to that becoming an authority in your industry is to have a session booked at a conference
session accepted, what you can do is you actually look to reverse engineer that. So within
12 months, you want to have that booked. Let's say within six months, you need to have your
outline of your sessions that you are going to apply. And you need to know what conferences
going back a step, your goal in the next three months is to actually research what conferences
available and what type of content they're actually looking for. And making sure that
you're validating dates, because this can actually change your priority on your tasks over the
next year. And then let's say that you're new to public speaking and the thought of doing this
actual session at the conference is really freaking you out. Maybe something that you want
to do in the next 30 days is join an organization like Toastmasters, which helps get you
experience public speaking and it really helps to prepare you to those improvisation moments
that always happen when you're on stage. And that's something that you can do in most major
cities, there's multiple chapters that you can join, so that makes it actually really easy thing.
So that goes into your task list. And it's also a milestone, maybe you set additional tasks
throughout in the next 12 months time, block it on your calendar, that you're going to attend
those regular meetings, then make sure that you also put into your calendar when you need
to put it in the applications for those conferences when you have the outlines. Also make
sure to note that if you plan on collaborating with any of your peers or out or seeking the
assistance of customers that that is also allocated into there as well. So see, when you break
this down, this is actually really easy. And if you think about this as things that you just truly
want to achieve, of course, there's going to be things that map to your company's goals.
But these are really something not.
But this is something that really originates and revolves around you.
And this is something that you should be going to on a regular basis. I personally look at
my plan and my vision on a weekly basis when I do planning.
Now you might not choose to look on a weekly basis. But at least once a month,
this should be a document that you're looking at reviewing and revising. Because one thing
that is always going to be true about your plan is that your plan is going to shift and change.
Best case scenario, it's shifting and changing the you're smashing that those goals ahead
of schedule. Now I know that this video is giving you so much information to get you up
and started. But as you actually create your strategies and your plan, there's going to be a
few things that you really want to dig into. Because this, at the end of the day, isn't just a goal list.
It's not just a task list. It's actually a strategy document to get you where you want to go.
The trouble is, is you might not be aware of all the strategies and resources available to
you to actually help you achieve those things.
I do have strategies that are available to you in my free masterclass.
Now, I didn't include it in here because vomiting strategy at people who weren't interested
in really just want to the process seems like it might be overkill. But if you do need strategy to
help augment and enhance their plan and help increase your chances of actually getting
there, you can feel free to check it out. You can go to capdecasolutions.com/masterclass and register.
I hope to see you there! You'll also want to make sure that you keep an eye out for my next video,
which is actually going to walk through the process and the template that I use with my
clients to help you create your career success plan. So if you start doing this and you just
don't know what to do what it looks like, make sure to check that video and if it's posted,
I'll also link it up here. If you liked this video, make sure that you click that like button it
lets me know that you like videos like this and it really supports my channel. If you
want to make sure that you do check out the next video and all the videos that I create to
help you thrive in your career make sure that you click that subscribe button. And if you
know someone who would be served by this video, remember sharing is caring and that
is an option down below. Thank you for being unapologetically ambitious and for taking
the time to watch this video. Again, I'll see you in my next video which is going to give you
an actual template walkthrough on implementing these strategies.
I will see you then! Thanks again for taking the time to hang out. I'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.