Hey Everybody! Andy here! Helping you build a career you love! Today, we're going to talk
about where do you see yourself in five years so if you're here with me live get in the chat say
hi if you're watching this on the recording welcome to you say hi to me in the comments
i'm diving right in where do you see yourself in five years now as an interview question
i think this is just epically stupid i really do i think it's a terrible interview question it's
rough there's a lot of a lot of ways to go wrong from an employer's standpoint it's not going to
teach them a lot about you but they're going to ask it and all i care about is helping you
so today i'm going to give you the best answer and the best way to answer this question the
best approach i can do all of that in under 45 seconds i can and for the incredibly impatient
i'm sure when all this is recorded we will somewhere in the youtube description have
a little link with a chapter note that says go right here for the answer except i think
you'll be terribly cheating yourself because i want to spend today helping you understand
what the value is in this question if we actually think about where do i want to be in five years
myself i think there's real value in that and then i'll take it one step further and i will
i will also help you figure out the additional applicabilities of how you want to respond to this
question and other uses of for that answer and things like when you're networking for your job
or when you're introducing yourself or in informational interviews a lot of you like
to like to call them so i'm gonna let's do all three of those today it's not gonna take us
very long but i think it's gonna be very powerful because i do want you to get some some value out
of that and since we're talking about interview questions today i've got a bonus for you that you
can grab uh the team can throw in the chat right now or we'll we'll we'll dump it in one of the
cards uh called ace your job interview it is a major booklet that i've put together
with 14 of the best job interview questions i think an employer can ask ask you and i want to
help you master the responses so it's all in the booklet grab that that's completely free
all right so now let's let's get into this i would like to engage the chat or if you're watching this
on the recording go into the comments and i want you to say just yes i agree with you Andy
or no i don't agree with you but let's think about this for a second would you agree that
we are who we are today based on decisions that we've made three to five years ago would you do
do you agree with that statement i think we are a byproduct of our choices the choices that i make
today are going to determine who i'm going to be or even better who i want to be years from now
every decision i make is a step toward where i want to go so i'm not sure where you are some
people are agreeing a lot of people are agreeing some people don't but i would tell you that every
decision it's my belief that every decision that you make today put you on a path to where you
want to go and i will also say that we are in a constant state of motion we are never set at
one point right the sentence i just said is gone that's done i'm on to something else right now
but what is constant what can be constant if if you think about it the trajectory we put
ourselves on based on the decisions we make if those decisions are based on the right things
the trajectory that you put yourself on can become can become constant and i think that
when you think about this if you are considering yourself in a constant state of motion
that's the trap in the question that's the trap in your life the where part of the question
where do you see yourself in five years and if you think where i want to be
think about that if you think where i want to be you will always be stuck with where you are
or more likely you will be stuck with where you are not but if instead we take
the word where out of there and we think about it in terms of who we want to be
i think now you will always be able to make decisions that are congruent with who you want
to be or who you want to become and that to me is something that in our lives and i mean this
in a good way can become more constant if we put ourselves on the right trajectory because
if we are always thinking about who we want to be then we're going to make decisions about is this
in alignment is this congruent with who i want to be is this decision moving me toward who i want
to be and what do i always say the joy is in the doing the joy is in the doing or as the pun goes
maybe in the being but think about that for a second because that is a big big deal this is how
i want you to think about this question so when you are given this question what is that what is
what is that all about instead of where i want to be who i want to be i don't know if you caught a
video i put out not so long ago about how to start your job search in the right place and i go into
detail about thinking through this it's something that i would highly recommend that you check out
as part of this but let's get into let's get into the answer here for a second because i know i know
you guys are probably you know wanting to talk about the details but let's let's talk about
what this question often leads most people to do that's the big mistake the big mistake in in the
question has more to do with the where part so if you don't think where for don't think where for
a second but think who i want to be but when you get the question where do you see yourself in five
years what most people do is they focus on the wear what does the wear make us do it makes us go
to a particular point in time and that's where the trap is in the question and that's what i want
you to avoid because the wear part does a couple things that does not do you well in the interview
the where puts you in a specific spot or more likely what 80 percent of people are inclined
to do when answering this question is to give not only a particular spot but a particular
title i see myself as the cio i see myself as the chief marketing officer i see myself
as the controller the head account whatever and and what that does is human nature the
receipt of that response the interviewer thinks one of two things and likely not in your favor
it's either unattainable or unavailable this happens a lot and let me i'll i'll tell you why
you gave them a particular point in time that says i feel like it's here today i can be there in five
years no does it it's not arguable no one's to say right but what interviewers do is they
think that person's crazy there's no way they're gonna go from system engineer to cio in five years
so you're nuts and you're out no job offer or what happens a lot for you overly ambitious types
is it actually is attainable but it's unavailable well we only have one cio he's not going anywhere
that chief marketing officer she's not going anywhere how are they going to get there that
fast that's a one-of-a-kind position in our company if i had a nickel for every one of
milewalk my executive search firm's clients who interviewed a candidate and ceos come back to
me and say well Andy there's no way i can hire her she said she wants to be this in five years
there's no way i have a career path that's going to help her do that she's going to be unhappy
i'd say stop asking those stupid questions you're going to penalize this person for being ambitious
right so i want you to think about this you guys i mean you might be snickering but i'm telling you
you are inclined to do this with this question unattainable or unavailable and either way your
host and the more ambitious you are the more hosed you are okay so that's the mistake alert
so now if you think about how you can answer this so it taught so you talk about who you want to be
as well as conveying something that gives them a good idea of the trajectory you want to be on
if somebody would ask me in seven years ago let's go seven all right mid 2015 i decided i
wanted to be a trainer in this capacity a career coach i was an executive recruiter full-time
that's what i did with 120 of my time so if you would ask me then Andy where do you see
yourself in five to seven years i would say i know i'll be working in a capacity where i will
be helping people find the right jobs so they can lead rewarding careers and fulfilled lives
i probably will be doing that in a coaching capacity i'm probably going to take advantage
of internet so i could reach more people right and you could flower it up any way you want
and i'll give you a little script kind of an engineered script that you can use
and if you're concerned about you know the ambition part well in seven years i'm gonna i see
myself reaching millions not thousands right who knows there might even be these great inventions
somebody might come up with an app where because we are epically impatient i'm gonna have to teach
people how to find the right job in 15 seconds maybe somebody's going to create something called
tic tac or something like that or a youtube short or instagram's only going to give me 60 seconds
or whatever right so if you think about what i said i said that 15 or 7 years ago about where
i'm going to be today in 2015 where i'm going to be today 2022 when we're recording this right so
think about that that's the trajectory now if you want to flower it up that's entirely up to you but
here's what the script looks like here's what i would say on the script so by the way this is
a sneaky peek of one of the 98 slides that i have for the job search minicamp 2022 but when it comes
to this question and you got to be Nostradamus here i want to work in a capacity where i can
you can you can call it a capacity you could call it marketing capacity coaching capacity
engineering capacity technology capacity whatever you want where i can what
what are you going to be doing helping people how are you going to do that i'm going to add value
i'm going to help them find the right job that's the value i'm going to help them with
i'm going to help them develop their career i want to be working in a capacity where i can add value
to the organization as it relates to marketing its products and so on this is trajectory and then
so that the people the company the community the market the industry the world
leads a rewarding career and fulfilled life kind of thing whatever the value is that
you're going to contribute and you could modify massage do whatever you'd like to
but the most important thing i want you to take away from this engineered sample
is the trajectory this is about who you want to be who you will be maybe even who you are now
but you're going to be in a larger capacity in the future so why does something like this work
you understand who you are you've got a great path you're consistent they can't select you out
because you didn't give them a specific point in time or something that they could
construe misconstrue as attainable unavailable whatever it might be you also are showing them
that how i do that is not going to stand in my way of who i'm going to be what do i what do i
often say to you right don't let the how drive the what most people throw in the towel before
they start any big project because they can't see all the steps so back seven years ago i didn't
know i was gonna have a weekly live show i didn't know i had to release a recorded video every week
or got to or will be doing that right i thought i might be blogging in my pajamas i but
that's just a how that's just a medium which is constantly changing but who i am does not
change and that's how you get out of the trap of life that's how you get out of the trap of this
question okay so i just wanna i wanna recap that portion is make sure however you want to answer
it that you were talking about directionally where you are going and who you are going to be
now you saw that language what does that look like for those of you that follow me around
the sites or in my programs or hawk my youtube channel doesn't that sound like that one video
i gave you about how to describe yourself in one sentence your elevator pitch maybe your linkedin
headline or something like that okay third point here what are the other applicabilities where
you could use something like this when you go to a networking session when you go to an informational
interview what is the inclination let's take the informational interview for a second
isn't the inclination hey so and so tell me about yourself what are you looking for what would you
be interested in and what do we do we go to a spot i want to be a systems analyst i want to
be a financial analyst i want to be this or that we don't have any of those available instead of
i want to work at an organization that's awesome in a capacity where i'm helping doing this or that
in trajectory terms not specific terms right so so when you're when you're thinking about this
you always want to think trajectory not a snapshot in time don't give them something to anchor on a
point or what's available okay so this is really really important so as you as you as you as you
build the structure about how you think about who you want to be the value you want to contribute
who those beneficiaries are and how you wrap that into different rhetoric for different purposes
like answering it in an interview serving as a focal point and a guide for yourself as
you go through your career when you meet new people how do you want to introduce yourself
or get connected with them or offer up to them how you can be of value to them their group
or their company this is how i would do it all right so that that that's in a nutshell and just
just to recap this uh make sure that any time you're doing that you're thinking about what is it
who am i gonna be what value am i gonna contribute and who's gonna benefit and how they're going to
benefit you'll you'll uh you'll you'll do great all right wait if you're enjoying that make sure
you click the like button you share this video you subscribe to the channel and don't forget grab the
ace your job interview uh ebook and for those of you that want the interview intervention book we
still have the book package for a limited time uh we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary
of this march of 2022 so so make sure you grab that as well ship it to you anywhere in the world
for seven bucks all right if you're watching this on the recording i'll see you next week
you