You’ve Built a Respectable Career, But Did You Design It?
If you're an ambitious, career-minded person in your 30’s or 40’s, then you're likely to have a list of career-based achievements like the following:
A string of promotions, leading higher and higher up the corporate ladder.
A salary that has either steadily increased or taken some significant leaps over the years.
An accolade of degrees, certifications, training, and awards that make your CV look very impressive.
Obtained the management position that you could only have dreamed of when you first started in your career.
At the same time, you may be feeling like something isn’t quite right.
Perhaps:
You are starting to feel less and less satisfied with each promotion and pay rise.
You look at the people above you and have no desire to be in their shoes.
You are beginning to feel trapped by your own success, like there’s no way out of the corporate rat race.
You feel like you don’t want your kids to have the same career experience as you, so you need to set a better example.
The problem isn’t that you need a completely new career, but that you need to design one.
What Is Career Design?
Simply put, Career Design is the process of intentionally shaping your work life around the person you are and the life you want to live.
Career Design considers aspects such as:
What your values are and how to integrate them into your work life.
Increasing things that give you energy, and decreasing the things that drain you of energy.
Understanding your true definition of success, not just the default version.
Identifying which constraints can’t be changed and adapting around them.
Trying small, low-risk career experiments to see what works.
Developing long-term plans for career changes.
Career Design isn’t about getting your ‘dream’ career or life.
It’s about making realistic and intentional changes and decisions about your career.
Career Design isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ approach. It’s an ongoing piece of work that adapts as your career, circumstances and motivations change.
A Career By Default
This may sound familiar:
Go to school and get good grades.
Go to College and University.
Get your first entry-level job at the first place that says ‘yes’
Work towards that first promotion.
Immediately have your eye on your next role.
Your salary increases, and so do your outgoings.
Get promoted to a management position.
Get more responsibility and people reporting to you.
Get a bigger house and a nicer car, etc.
Each next step in this timeline seems perfectly reasonable, as it's the ‘logical step’.
This doesn’t mean it was what you wanted to do.
These decisions add up over time, and in 10-20 years, you have no idea how you got to where you are in your career.
It’s similar to ‘The 1 Degree Deviation’ analogy: if a plane is 1 degree off course, for every 50 miles it flies, it will miss its destination by 1 mile.
Ask yourself:
Did you plan to end up in the role and industry you are in when you first started your career?
Can you track the decisions you’ve made over the last 10 years that have led you here?
Does what you’ve achieved align with your definition of success?
Unfortunately, most people have careers by default.
Career Design Isn't About Finding Your Dream Job
As I mentioned above, Career Design isn’t about finding your passion or your dream job.
Careers and life are complicated things. You have constraints, things you need to compromise on, and immovable obstacles you can’t avoid.
On top of that, situations, motivations and desires constantly shift.
Career Design is an active, realistic and ongoing approach to making the most out of the situation you are in.
In some cases, this may result in big career changes or pivots, but in others it could mean adjusting your current career or using other avenues to better align with your strengths and values.
It could also result in changing your perspective about your current career by challenging beliefs or gaining insight into how you operate within your work life.
Life Driving Your Career, Not the Other Way Around
I believe that your life should drive your career.
This means that the work you do is a reflection of your values, strengths and interests.
If it were flipped and your career is driving your life, then this would mean that you have less free time for yourself or with your family.
You have less freedom to pursue other interests such as hobbies or creative pursuits.
You don’t feel trapped by your success, your salary or the title you currently hold at work.
Now, some of this sounds idealistic; I know that.
For each thing you want in your life, you have to make a compromise to make it happen.
And these compromises have to be made intentionally, by you.
As the saying goes: “You can have anything you want; you just can’t have everything”.
This is why understanding values and creating your own definition of success is at the core of Career Design. Once you have those, you become clearer on the compromises you have to make to have them.
What is Career Design Coaching?
Coaching is the vehicle in which Career Design is delivered.
Through coaching conversations, the coach will help you to evoke awareness, challenge beliefs, and provide accountability to make significant change.
Coaching is done to the same standards and philosophy as the International Coaching Federation (ICF) core competencies.
Career Design is simply the lens through which the coaching is done.
So, if you’ve previously been coached by an ICF-accredited coach, it will feel familiar.
The difference is that the sessions have more of a focus on the specific areas of Career Design which I have spoken about above.
Career Design Coaching vs Career Coaching
Traditional Career Coaching can involve some of the following services, amongst other things:
Goal setting.
CV development.
Interview preparation.
Provide career advice
Career Design Coaching is more aligned to executive and leadership coaching, but focuses on helping the client make realistic, intentional career changes.
Read the full comparison here.
Introducing The DESIGN Method
The DESIGN Method is a six-stage coaching framework for building a career by design, not by default.
The programme flows through 6 stages and includes:
Define - To better understand yourself, including your values, strengths, and interests.
Envision - To envision your personal version of success, outside of traditional, default measures of success.
Situate - To get a picture of where your career is at, what’s working and what needs changing.
Integrate - To build coherence between what you want and your career. This is where we start intentionally designing your career.
Generate - To come up with some low-risk experiments on how you can trial your newly designed career.
Navigate - To take what you learnt from your experiments and develop a plan on how to implement them into your career long-term.
Each stage includes a pre-session worksheet which will get you thinking and help you to bring topics to a coaching session.
These are designed to help inspire awareness and insight so you don’t come into the coaching session ‘cold’.
The DESIGN Method includes:
Introductory Call - To assess if the programme is right for you.
Pre-Programme Survey - To baseline how you feel about your career.
6 x Worksheets - One to complete before each coaching session.
6 x 45-minute Coaching Sessions.
Post-Programme Survey - To help quantify the progress you’ve made.
Closing Session - To review & celebrate progress, and discuss what’s next.
Inter-Session Support - For accountability and additional support.
The DESIGN Method is launching very soon.
To register your interest, please follow this link.
