Start with “Who” — a framework for planning your career goals.

Will Parkinson
Dunelm Technology
Published in
7 min readJan 20, 2023

So…where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time?

That dreaded question that nobody wants to be asked. Not in interviews, not in your manager reviews…not in any situation really.

We don’t like being asked this question about our future career because, frankly, we don’t tend to put any time in to think about it. Why not? Well it’s probably because it challenges us to reflect on where we want to be in our career vs where we actually are…that can feel like an overwhelming topic.

How many of us (really) want to spend our time thinking about “where we aren’t” in our career…it’s an entirely ambiguous concept that isn’t always that positive and let’s face it, living in the “here and now” takes up SO much time and energy…

As a hardworking person, what if you genuinely gave your career the same amount of time, attention and focus that you give to your current day to day tasks at work?

Consider this. The most important project in your life is you.

The average person spends over 90,000 hours at work in their lifetime, so why don’t we put the same rigour into the biggest and most complex project in our lives (ourselves) as we do into the work for our current roles. Let’s be honest, if someone dropped a 90,000 hour project into your lap in your current role…you’d make a plan right?

The short answer to all of this is we should give more attention to our 90,000 “life” project and it’s doesn’t need to be as scary as it sounds.

Over the years, I have been developing and adapting a career framework that (I think) has helped me structure my career and my development. Specifically, it’s simplified the decisions around why I would move roles and what the goals I needed to achieve would be from any move. It’s also helped me say “no” to things.

I’m going to try to articulate this framework, but please understand that frameworks are imperfect things and like all imperfect things, you need to be conscientious about taking the things that could work for you, be prepared to build on concepts that might not be quite right and leave the things out that won’t work for you.

Sadly, there is no playbook for “nailing” your career (that I know of…). There are only choices that we can make and this is just one small thing that may help you in some small way to make better long term, intentional choices for yourself. Alternatively, you’ll get no value from this at all…but I appreciate you for reading it anyway.

START WITH WHO:

Careers trajectories can be completely organic, wayward even and so how can anyone really control or predict their path?

I struggled with the idea of what my career would look like, longer term. I could tell you what I would likely do next and whether it was (or wasn’t) what my manager was doing. I definitely couldn’t articulate why choosing one career next step would be better than another for me…or even what my goal would be from any decision that I did make. I just hoped it might pay a bit more.

I decided to try a different approach for myself and not start with WHAT role, but WHO did I want to be. It felt like a simpler question.

If I could figure out WHO I wanted to be, then the rest could be shaped around achieving that. I started with people I looked up to and respected in my career so far. First question I asked, “do I want to be like them”. I found myself saying “yes” pretty quickly.

These were the people that I felt, if I could be like them (irrespective of role), I would feel good about my career and myself. So, what was it about them that I thought made them great and what traits did they have in common?

  • Deep expertise — a reason that people would listen to them
  • Transformation — take something that wasn’t working & improve it
  • Scale — All could take what we were doing and make it bigger and better
  • Behaviours — All were charismatic, authentic, and empowering leaders

There were other things too, of course, that I considered during this thought exercise, but these stood out to me as the “clearest”.

BUILD YOUR PILLARS:

These above traits, formed the core of my new framework.

They became the pillars for my career and helped me to define who I would aspire to be, whatever future path I decided to choose. This gave me a basis for decision making that I could use, that I had never had before. I could assess whether a potential career move was valuable, aligned or right for me.

I laid it out in the following way to visualise it.

CHOOSE YOUR PATH

This then allowed me to start thinking about the next parts of my framework. I could stop here and have a way to make decisions…but if I wanted to emulate the people I aspired to be like and respected, I decided to next think about how I wanted to leverage those pillars and behaviours.

Did I want to be a leader, an expert or something else…

I asked myself an open question, “what are the options I would be interested in”. Then came up with the following things and decided to take a slightly deeper look at them:

  • I could try to start my own business
  • I could be a CEO for a small/medium company one day
  • I could just keep doing this Product Manager thing and specialise more
  • I could try to run a Product Organisation

I knew quickly that I wanted to be a leader, so that left me with three options.

  • I could try to start my own business
  • I could be a CEO for a small/medium one day
  • I could try to run a Product Organisation

I knew I couldn’t start my own business yet, I had just had a child and I wasn’t about to start something else new right now. One day maybe I might start my own thing, but definitely not now. That left me with two options:

  • I could be a CEO for a small/medium one day
  • I could try to run a Product Organisation

Both were leadership roles and I felt pretty good about those as ambitious goals. Now I would be able to add the next parts to my framework (but note, if you went down an individual contributor path, you wouldn’t necessarily have to add more layers to your framework).

USING THE FRAMEWORK TO MAKE BETTER CAREER DECISIONS:

This was now a framework that gave me clear goals and allowed me to objectively assess where I was in my current career vs those goals. I started to plot my previous roles onto this and add my experience against these pillars. What had I done so far to demonstrate that I was an expert, what transformation or scale experience did I have? Are there examples of me living my behavioural values?

Very quickly I realised where my gaps were and that started to allow me to determine what type of role I would need to take next. I could have high conviction in any choices that any role / move would be right for me and my career (whether internal or external moves).

Every decision I have made in my career to date, from the moment I created this framework, has been intentional. Every role has been for a purpose, with a goal that was part of a bigger career objective. What was also interesting, was that I found I could now talk more confidently in interviews about what I had done, why I had done it, what I was good at and what my goals were.

It was liberating to know that I was now making informed choices for myself and my career and I started to see that it helped me to accelerate my career too. When people ask me “why did you do x or y”, I can respond with absolute clarity. It’s made decisions on what companies and roles I should consider, so much simpler!

So, “where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time?”… the answer is that I know that I will end up in a good place. I know WHO I will continue to be in any role and some intentional career paths that will allow me to demonstrate the traits and behaviours I care about.

This is just one way of looking at something very complicated and providing some structure. I know it’s not perfect and it’s not to say that it will work for everyone, but if nothing else, it is a different way of looking at your career and something that most people do spend very little time thinking about.

If this helps anyone, in any way, then I think it was worth putting pen to paper on this.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Published in Dunelm Technology

Tales about the great technology being used and the talented team behind it at Dunelm — the home of homes. Covering everything from high level whim-driven musings about technological trends right through to deep-dive technical discussions and personal projects.

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?