If you want to take control of your professional career, you must know that to be involved in a Career Coaching process is highly beneficial. In a process of this nature, you explore: what you want to do, where you want to go, what kind of positions you would like to apply for, and overall to know which results and journey will make you happier.
What are the typical thoughts you have when you are not 100% happy with your career?
- I have been a lot of time in the same position, and I do not know how to grow. I feel stagnant.
- My job is not motivating me anymore…
- I want to change, but I do not dare.
- I want to work in something that make me happy.
- I do not know what to do with my professional future.
- To achieve my objective, I need to define a journey for the coming years, and I do not know how to do it.
When these thoughts arise, it is important you will be proactive, and you start to work in your career, to capture the opportunities/path that will make you happier.
I’ve been involved many times in this kind of processes, through 3 different angles: being responsible for my team during my professional career in FMCG, managing my own career and in the past 3 years with my coaching clients. And basically, I can summarize the whole process to achieve our career objectives in 4 main phases:
1. Explore you values.
Behind any professional, there is a person. And people are driven by their values, their beliefs and their roots.
In my opinion, before starting any kind of conversation about “that promotion”, “that country”, “that job”, “that training plan”,… the first thing, always the first is to really deep dive in the human side, as it will be the base to build the rest of the process.
How do we do it? Exploring deeply your values, thoughts, what drives you, what does not, …, and mainly, how they will influence the decisions you will make.
2. Design your Scenarios.
Once you know your roots, lets design the scenarios you want to build. In which directions do you want to grow? do you wnat to acquire new skills? do you want to work in parallel in new things?…
At this stage you must draw all the possibilities, even the ones that look so far that we usually underestimate, as they can surprise us.
Once done, let’s choose the ones that correlate better with your values (you decide how many).
3. Build you Marketing Plan.
You need a plan to succeed for any of the chosen scenarios. How? Analysing your starting point and comparing it with the final objective. Then, your work will be to “fulfil” the gaps.
The plan can be based on: working your influence, development of specific skills, update your technical capabilities, and so many possibilities.
Sometimes, when we are building the marketing plan for any of the chosen scenarios, we realize that what’s needed to do to achieve some of them, it’s too much, and we don’t want to invest all that time & energy. So, it means that even in this third stage, we continue choosing…, in fact we choose during the whole process. It will be a live process.
4. Stakeholder Mapping & Action Plan.
At this stage we are in the “Go to Market” phase and the only missing point to make your plan a reality, is your Stakeholders mapping and how is going to be our positioning towards them.
Stakeholders can be diverse, as the only thing they need to have in common between them, is to be valuable for you: people in your current company, talent search companies, mentors, other similar profiles to yours, people in other industries, teachers in Executive Programs, Coaches, etc.
Summarizing:
If you want to control your career, you need to put your ideas in order, define what is success for you, to choose the possibilities that makes you happier (aligned with your values), and to work hard to achieve them.
And of course, ask for help when you need it.
