A Simple Framework for Career Move

We all have moments during our careers where we become restless and think:

I am ready for something new, but I have got no idea what this next job looks like!

This can be quite daunting or can even cause outright fear. But, making career choices is a continuous process during our whole career, rather than just a one-time event. As we are learning and developing ourselves, we will want to move on to new challenges. In addition, our work-context is continuously changing around us and we may decide at some stage that our current work environment is not right for us anymore. Career changes therefore can be gradual moves to a next step or a complete departure from what we were doing before.

As our life expectancies go up and the work context is more dynamic than ever, we can all expect to make more career choices during our lives than our parents have ever done.

As writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders has dubbed, "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans".

In his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs likewise said:

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Hence, I do believe in career planning, even if I know that it will probably never play out the way I hoped it would. Few years ago, I came across a simple framework that helped me think about my next career steps.

Let me now share the framework. I hope, you may actually be positively surprised!

There are four pieces to it.

1)     Edge – The things you are really good at. This is everything that makes you special when you compare yourself to your peers. Your Edge are those strengths that make you special and differentiate you from others.

2)     Flow – what you enjoy doing. Being in flow means forgetting the world around you because you are fully absorbed by the task at hand. Flow is a joyful situation of energized focus. When you are in flow, your work feels effortless. Ask yourself,

• In which situations over the last few months have you been in flow?
• What’s the common theme in these situations?

3)     Context – the environment you want to work in. The assumption here is that a context that supports our development will ultimately make us more successful. I still believe that the optimum is a pleasant work environment with significant, but healthy challenges. Ask yourself,

• What’s the context you need around you in order to be successful?
• In what type of organizational culture do I want to work?
• What are my colleagues like?
• How much money do I want to make?
• How important is career growth to me?
• What are the opportunities for advancement?
• What does the work environment look like?
• What’s the ideal location of my work?
• Where do I want to live?
• How international should the environment be?
• Are there opportunities to travel?
• What’s the work-life balance like?
• How important is autonomy to me?
• With which types of stakeholders do I want to work?
• And last but not least: What do my loved ones (e.g. my partner, family, and friends) need from me in order to be happy?

4)     Legacy – what you want to build during your career. Legacy is what you want to do for others.

The next step is to start brainstorming about your options. The question is:

which jobs meet at least some, or most, or even all of these criteria?

What the framework really does is provide you with a picture of all the relevant criteria for your next job. I would encourage you to not overthink this. Just make a first version. You can always change things later, as you learn more about yourself.