Create Your Personalized Career Map

1. Identify Career Areas of Interest. You now have a long list of skills marked for whether you are passionate about them or interested in them from the first activity in this chapter. And, you just found a set of different job roles that have elements that excite and fit you in some way. It’s time to some qualitative analytics on yourself! Use your critical thinking and analysis skills to sift through this information. What are the similarities or differences between the skills and jobs you are interested? Are there groupings of things you are interested in? Are those groupings a type of job or are they more about applying a certain type of skill? How many different groupings are you interested in? Take a moment to summarize the career areas you are interested in. Give them labels and descriptions. There is no “right” way to describe an area of interest, fill the table in using any grouping that makes sense to you. For those who like examples, a couple have been provided to spark your ideas, but don’t let those limit how you approach defining the types of things that interest you.

Example:

2. Map your many possible paths. Careers don’t follow straight lines. People don’t usually stay in one area or type of job role any more. One job doesn’t only lead to only one other possible job. Many careers have overlapping transferable skills, which means that your possible career paths will have many intersection points and many different directions you can take. There’s always more than one path to get to any place and fewer boundaries than you might think. For this reason, I don’t like career maps that focus on jobs. Instead, I think you should aim to spend your career flourishing in your areas of interest – specifically the ones you identified above. This way you can look for jobs, projects, growth opportunities, networking connections, and anything else that comes your way in alignment with your career interests in a more holistic and natural way. This is also why linear or structured career maps don’t work well. My favorite way to map out possible career paths is visually using a mindmap. A mindmap is a type of diagram that is great for showing non-linear relationships among a lot of different possible items. In a mindmap you can visually show many concepts all linked to or arranged around a central concept. In this case, you and your current career status will be at the center.

1. For this exercise, grab some paper and writing utensils, or use an online tool (you’ll find mindmapping tools available online, or templates in collaboration tools like miro.com). Draw a circle in the middle; this circle represents you. Write your name, initials, or even a cute little drawing of yourself, and add in a small amount of text indicating your current career situation. You might simply write your current job title, or that you are a student. You might indicate if you are currently seeking a job or happy in your current role. Keep it short and simple, this is just to give you a starting point. Think of this as a “You are here” marker on your map.
2. In the space around you (the center circle), draw circles for each of the career areas of interest you identified above. Give yourself some space between your center circle and these new career interest circles so there is room on the map to add things in between, and also make sure to leave some space around these area of interest circles so you can add stuff related to them.
3. Now, it’s time to get creative! Mindmapping is most often used as a brainstorming technique and that’s how you should approach this next step. To brainstorm is just to freely try to come up with as many different and creative ideas and aspects you can think of.
   1. Start by listing any and everything you can think of that is related to your career areas of interest in the space around and outside of those circles (keep the space between you and the area of interest empty for now). You can write job role titles you might be interested in. List skills you are passionate about or activities you want to do. You might put the names of people you admire or write words that inspire you about that type of work. Don’t overthink, just let your thoughts flow. Draw a line between any of these items that are connected to each other (for example, if certain skills are linked to a type of job, you might see lines drawn between those items). You might also have some items that are linked to more than one career area of interest, put them on your map and draw a line connecting them to any career area of interest circles they apply to. Don’t worry if it gets messy, this is about creative thinking, not making a pretty picture.
   2. In the space between you and your career areas of interest, brainstorm possible ways you can get from where you are today to a career that puts you more deeply into your areas of interest. You can list jobs that will help you grow your skills from where they are today to where you want them to be one day. You can list learning activities that would help you build your expertise in that area. You could indicate places or ways you could build a network with people who share this interest. It’s okay if some things that will help you get there are already on the on your map in another location, you don’t need to write them twice. This isn’t about precision. But do try to focus on adding in items in this step that are action oriented and might help you get to or spend more time in your areas of interest.
   3. Optional. There are planners and then there are those who would rather go with the flow. If you don’t like being confined to a strict plan for your future, his mindmap might be all you need. It will give you enough of a sense of where you are, and the places you can explore. Think of it like having a map to an amusement park. It doesn’t tell you where to go, but it helps you know all the different places you can go and have fun. But, there are also those who love to plan and can’t really have fun without it. These people go on vacation and want to know where they’re headed to first, how they will make sure they have enough time to see all the sights, and don’t want to just ‘figure it out when I get there.’ If you are a planner, the mindmap might feel a little too lose for you. To fix that, just add in a little more structure to your map. Start drawing lines that indicate order and importance. For example, if some items need to be learned or accomplished before others draw arrows or use numbers to indicate a possible order or plan that you can follow. You can also highlight items with labels that will allow you to plan out the actions you will take. For example, you might mark items that are “quick wins” that you could do now or easily to move you closer to your interests. Or, you might mark items that are most impactful because they are connected to multiple things on your map and so doing them next will have the greatest impact on your career. With this, you can create a more immediate plan of what you want to do today, what you might do next, and which things you might focus on in the future.

[Add in images of examples, with it shown at each stage of the process.]