The Power of Career Vision

Are you struggling to land your next job? Time to go against your instinct: stop obsessing over process, start thinking big. You need a career vision.

I've mentored dozens of operators from startups and scaleups, the military and corporates. What I've found is they're typically great at helping someone else realise a vision, but not very good at doing it for themselves. We make great right-hand people.

Operators tend to excel at playing off a visionary leader, turning a crazy dream into something a team can achieve with structured systems, policies and processes. But without a dream, without that character to bounce off, we often feel a bit lost and unsure how to use their skills and experiences for their own benefit.

If you have a colour-coded spreadsheet tracking 100+ job applications, but you’re getting few to no interviews, you're probably focusing on the wrong things. If your CV is packed with “86% efficiency gains” and “-1.5x cost reductions”, but it reads like it was written by a robot, it won't resonate with hiring managers on an emotional level.

You need to tell a compelling story about who you are, how you got to where you are in your career and – most importantly – where you're headed. Your desired role and ultimate career vision should align with the vision of the company you’re applying to, and the needs and expectations of the hiring manager – both stated and implied.

It sounds simple enough; except, you first need to step out of your comfort zone and ask yourself some deep questions that can’t be answered with logic and reason alone:

• Who am I?

• How did I get here?

• What do I want to become?

Identifying your dream role and making a strategy to land it is hard. But you're an operator so, once you have the vision and strategy, executing it will come naturally.

Once you have a clear career vision, you can move on to hero storytelling, self-productising, personal branding, and finally the nitty gritty of networking and job hunting. I’ll be sharing tools and tips for all of those things in due course.

I've done this, as have many operators I've worked with, so you can too!

Career Vision Exercise

Here’s an exercise I designed to craft your career vision in as little as 30 minutes. It’s the second thing I ask new mentees to do, following the Core Values Exercise, before we have our initial deep dive session. As a paying community member, you can request a downloadable PDF version, chat with your peers and get feedback from me on your results. Here’s a full list of the benefits you get by joining the community.