Career Guide: Mapping Your Future in 2016

Whether you are a recent graduate looking to make an entry into the working world in 2016, or an existing employee wondering where your career is going, there is no better time to take stock of your working life than at the start of the new year. Follow these tips and start making notes to help you map your future career for 2016 and beyond.

Visualization is key
In order to effectively map your future, it’s imperative that you learn to visualize not only where you are headed, but also how you will get there. Visualization requires a clear picture with specific details, so this will force you to really think about the practical details of your future and what you will need to implement them. To get to a point where you can visualize the specifics, consider the following:

1. What’s in it for you in the long run?
Before you take the first step in the right direction, it’s important to rather “zoom out” and sees if you can picture what your career will look like… at the end. What will you have achieved? Who will you have in your network? What impact will your work life have had on your family, your community, and perhaps even globally? Do you want to work for a modest salary and have a comfortable retirement, or do you have the potential to change the world? Are you chasing material benefits to a healthy career – i.e.: do you see yourself in a big house with a luxury car and a weekend yacht rental? – or will you work to earn a salary to support a community outreach program so that others also benefit from your industriousness? Once you know what your “bigger picture” looks like, you can start reverse-engineering the results and working backward to get to the finer details.

2. Where do you want to work?
Can you picture yourself on a steady corporate career path, making your way from post room to CEO corner office? Or are you best suited to work in a start-up environment that offers a more casual office environment? If you know which business environment you’re best suited for, you’ll immediately invest more energy in going after what you want, rather than being indecisive about what you think you might want.

3. What skills and experience will you need?
Think about who your business role model is. What does their career look like? What business experience do they have? What qualifications did they get? If you know you want to work your way up the corporate ladder in a finance job or land the perfect engineering job, you will need the relevant qualifications as well as a certain number of years to enjoy the experience. It’s never too late to extend your education or to change careers, so add these details onto your career map, based on where you see yourself in the long run.

4. What are you passionate about?
The most important underlying question to a fulfilling and satisfying career is: what are you passionate about? Not everyone will land a career as a video game tester or a professional motorbike racer, but you can find a way to pursue these dreams if it’s important enough to you. You can also approach your passions from the perspective of using your working life to afford you the means to participate in these activities. If you’re not sure what you’re passionate about, one method of finding out is by asking the following questions:

• What did you really enjoy doing as a child?
• What activities make time fly by for you?
• What do you enjoy doing at present that you wish you could do as a job?
• If money was no object, what would you rather be doing?

5. Create a vision board
It’s one thing to visualize how you want things to be, but it’s an entirely different skill to manifest these milestones and achievements into reality. By creating a vision board, you are turning your goals into concrete pictures, which will compel you to act on them. You can go so far as to assign a timeline to your milestones, especially if you are going the route of studying, doing an internship, getting a full-time job, and getting promoted until you reach your ultimate goals.

And once you know where you’re going, you can take the first step in that direction. All the best for 2016!

Is a new challenging job something that you want to pursue in 2016? Let us at Communicate Recruitment help you with your search.

We have great Finance jobs, IT jobs, Engineering jobs, Freight jobs, or Supply Chain jobs. Check out our vacancy page and apply now!