Unless you're the beneficiary of a reclusive billionaires' estate, you're likely going to have to work. Your career is therefore an essential part to your success plans for the future. Are you on track to reach those career goals?
Knowing if you are on track to reach your career goals starts first with designing the career, and the life, you want to live. So what is the process to design your career?
The process of designing your career falls into 3 steps:
- Set your career Goals
- Modelling the success of others
- Investment in your skills
The first step to leading a successful career, the first step to success, is to work out what your goal actually is. The importance of this first step cannot be stressed enough. Often times our careers are treated haphazardly, accepting work and jobs based on a select few criteria. Settling into a career because "that's what my parents wanted", or following in their footsteps. Or we chase career progression for the paycheck, and the prestige we think that buys us.
How many times have we answered that "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" question with where we think that job will lead? How many times have we looked into the future without asking if our path is heading where we actually want to go?
Once we have taken some time to determine where we want to be professionally, we need to evaluate what it will take to get there. Fortunately, every next step that we want to take has already been taken by someone else. At one point in time or another, someone has walked a similar path to the one we're headed down. And this is excellent news. Now we have an example to follow, the skills, the knowledge, and the understanding that our dreams are possible.
The second step to designing your career is best summed up by Les Brown, as he reflects on a lesson his mentor taught him,
"Success leaves clues. Always listen to, and follow people who are doing what you want to do, at the level you want to do it."
Les Brown
Studying those who are standing where you want to stand will provide a clear picture as to what skills you will need to develop. That knowledge is invaluable. Write down those skills. And on the page before you will be a list of skills, a road map to the successful career that you hope to live.
Finally the third step; investment in your skills.
This is by far the most time consuming, expensive, and exhausting step. To learn the skills needed to be successful, we need to continually invest in ourselves. Investment in the audio programs, the mentors, the books, and the courses that develop our skills. These investments are essential to becoming more valuable, more capable of following the road map to our success.
The first two steps have provided you the road map to the career you aspire to. But the blueprints to your career are only valuable if you put in the time and effort required to build the skills necessary. This third and never-ending step of investing in yourself and your abilities will result in you working, and living the life that you desire.