What’s Your Career Story – A key step in getting the Career of Your Dreams!

A quick piece of help for any of you looking at applying for your next big promotion or looking to make a change career…

Whatever stage you are at in the process of looking for your dream job – whether just thinking about looking , through to preparing for the interview – I highly recommend doing this exercise. It’s all about you and how your story that has got you to this point. It’s super simple and will enable you to visualise your journey.

Benefits

This exercise will help you:

•Get some clarity about your next career step and whether you should change career.

•Jog your memory and bring up great examples and achievements, all sorts of things you’d forgotten about from your career to date which is great preparation for an interview

• Prepare for the ‘warm up question’ that lots of businesses ask – ‘what makes you a good fit for this role?’ or ‘tell us about your career to date’

• Get your brain working and your creative juices flowing.

• Take an enjoyable walk down memory lane.

• Visualise your career journey in the interview so that you can recall the important parts with ease.

1. Take a large sheet of paper and draw a timeline across the centre of it.
2. Along the line note key dates – start of jobs, important projects, awards etc.
3. Above the line note key tasks/ projects etc associated with the job – if you like to doodle, include symbols and drawings that represent important elements of your roles.
4. Below the line capture key achievements and skills acquired. I encourage you to use different colours to represent different things – tasks/ projects/ skills/ achievements.

What you’ll end up with is a 1 page story of your career.

What now?

From this you can identify important events etc that you want to raise as part of your opening (or when you get asked the ‘tell us about yourself’ question). It allows you to easily give the highlights of your career to this point – and specifically the ones that relate to the job you’re applying for.

The question to ask yourself is:
What are the highlights of my story so far that make me right for this job?

Hold onto it, scan it, or take a picture of it. Every time you go for a new job, you are just adding to it. You can extend it with extra pages, and end up with a visual representation of your career.

If you’re not sure whether you should change career you could look at it and ask yourself:

What might my story be telling me about my next move?

Reflecting on the past can be a great way of making decisions about our future.

As I said, this is just one step in the process, keep following for more.

For more career winning ideas please join my group GenWomen’s Career Winners

Until next time

Let your light shine xx