What is Your 'Personal Career Vision?'

By Steve Bohler | July 2008

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If you think you'll be happier in your career simply by switching companies, think again. To find be successful and love your work, you'll need more than a job. So, before you focus on resume writing, networking, and job hunting, you'll need what I call a "personal career vision." To start building a tangible blueprint of your life’s direction you need to get a deeper understanding of who you are and what you want out of your life and career. Skipping this step may lead you back into the wrong career. On the other hand, using this information will give you the raw materials to create a masterpiece of a career and life.

Some Facts

• The average person has three careers and ten different jobs in his or her lifetime. (source: Department of Labor)
• 79 percent of IT workers surveyed plan to change jobs within the next 12 months (source: Oxford CareerFitNow Analysis)
• Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. is the most common time of the week for heart attacks (source: Center for Disease Control).

People often hop into jobs they dislike as much as the ones they just left. Instead of taking the time to understand who they are, what they want, and what they can offer the world, they job hop with the increasingly unlikely expectation their next position will bring happiness.

Creating a Personal Career Vision

Recently, authors Bob McDonald and Don Hutcheson asked a number of people, "What made you happy and successful?" Virtually all of the respondents, they say, cited two factors: First, they knew about and used their natural talents. Second, they created, and are guided by, a clear personal vision.

A personal career vision is a blueprint for exactly the type of work you should be doing, based on information about what you are naturally good at, what you want, and what you think is worth doing.

How do you create one?

• Stop. The usual person lives on a virtual treadmill. We keep busy following the wrong priorities all the while building up our stress level.  This treadmill will keep you focused solely in the here and now. You must stop and give yourself a concentrated time to reflect on where you’ve been and where you want to go.
• Reflect where you’ve been and where you are now. There are times in our lives when we feel compelled to evaluate our situation to see how well it matches our expectations. I call these times "turning points." While many of us assess our jobs and lives on a daily basis, there are certain milestones that naturally lend themselves to deeper evaluation. For example, at around 38 to 45 years old, we often start to realize that half of our life has passed and begin to really wonder if what we’re doing is worth doing. It becomes increasingly important as we get older to feel what we’re doing is meaningful. At this and other turning points, we need to ask ourselves if we are heading in the direction of our true nature and dreams.
  
• Assess how you’re hard-wired, what you really want, and what you want to offer the world.  When you understand and can articulate what you most want for your life and what your ideal job or career is, you’re much more likely to get there. For example, look over your job history and identify themes that run through the jobs you’ve loved and those you’ve hated. Your next job or career should have more of what you’ve repeatedly like, and less of what you tend to dislike.

Okay. So how do you go about this? More detail on that in my next column.

Steve Bohler is director and head career coach for the Oxford Program of Career Change.

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