Stop Drifting: Four Pillars to Own Your Career
A routine for building confidence in your career
I got cut from my job before Netflix with no warning, got a call on a Friday, no reason given, and 10 min later lost all access to my work accounts.
Most people will face an unexpected career change at some point leading to a scramble to figure out the next move. It’s easy to get comfortable in a job and lose the edge that it takes to compete for a new job, a promotion, or to start your own thing.
I define career fitness as four pillars:
Goal Clarity
Network Strength
Impact Visibility
Industry Awareness
The 5th pillar that makes all of these work is “Routine Lock”. Without having a locked-in routine to refine, adapt, and maintain the other four, you fall behind.
These roughly translate into:
What do you want to do
Who will support you
Can you prove you can do it
Do you have the right skillset to pull it off
Commonly we think about these topics only during a job search, but with a little time each week, you can build and maintain your career fitness. Let’s look at the first in more detail:
Goal Clarity
Goal clarity is more than just getting and keeping a job. Career paths are somewhat like navigating a chess board, but unlike in chess where the goal is clear, in careers it’s up to you to decide what winning means. Whether it’s stability, money, quality of life, an industry you're passionate about working in, growth, location, etc; we all navigate through these at various times.
Ask yourself what your goal is, then use the 3 Whys (ask why three times in a row) to get down to the real answer. It may be work related, it may not be, but whatever that real goal is, that’s what’s motivating you and having clarity on this enables you to set a routine to achieve it.
A couple years ago my goal changed, and I went from a director role back to an IC. It meant a step back according to traditional career paths, and it was harder pass interviews as a programmer after not having a technical focus for years, but I had clarity on my overall goal of wanting to enjoy my day to day work more.
Network Strength
Navigating your career solo is next to impossible, and networking is more than just accepting connection requests from random people on LinkedIn.
Ask yourself how many industry connections you have, outside your current company, that match the following criteria:
Remember who you are
Would support you in a job search
Work at companies or are in roles that you see yourself in someday
If the answer is less than 10, you have some work to do. The good news is, this only takes a small amount of time per week to maintain, and it’s easy, all you have to do is talk to people who you already know and maintain the relationship.
Most people have hundreds if not thousands of connections and that’s fine, but you need to have a small group of real connections that you could lean on if needed, and hopefully they feel the same about you.
Impact Visibility
You can write impact statements on your resume with accolades and metrics, but if you want inbound interest for jobs, it takes more than a resume or LinkedIn. It’s well known that one part of being promoted is having your work within a company be visible, so why not take this same approach to your career?
Out of the four pillars, this one is likely the hardest to come with a plan for. Here’s some things I’ve done:
Speak at meetups and conferences
Go on podcasts
Write on LinkedIn (and this newsletter)
Teach classes
If coding is your focus, build something in public. This doesn’t mean GitHub projects or portfolio sites, it means building something real, ideally with other people, and showcasing the journey for others to see. Open source is another interesting avenue to showcase your technical skills.
Industry Awareness
Most people that are reading this are likely in tech, and tech moves REALLY fast. It’s easy to get tunnel vision on your job and the technologies used and lose track of the industry trends. This is especially true at larger companies that have a lot of internal tools and platforms.
Being aware means:
Looking at job posts to see what skills companies want before you start searching
Build things outside of your job and experiment with different tech
Follow trends with newsletters, tech blogs, and industry experts
The double benefit is doing this will help in your current job too. Every company wants people that are looking around the corner and preparing for what’s next.
Routine
Routines are hard. I’ve done two half marathons now. The first one I made up my own training routine for thinking I used to run races in high school and college, I know what to do. Race day came, I finished, but much slower than my goal and could barely walk for the rest of the day, so clearly I’d done something wrong. The next time I used the Runna app to set my routine; I beat my goal by almost 10 minutes and felt fine afterwards!
We do this in our careers, especially if we’ve been in an industry for a while. We just assume we know what to do and that we’re prepared, but almost everybody that I do coaching sessions with leading up to an interview, or some other career event, is lacking in a routine and not feeling as confident as they could be.
My routine for the pillars above is 15 min most days that I work, it’s not an exact science, but it’s amazing how much you can do in 15 min if you focus.
15 Minutes
Everybody can do these things, and it only takes a small amount of time. What can you you do today to improve your career fitness?
- Dan
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