The Ultimate Career Development Guide

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The Ultimate Guide For Career Development

My friend and Career Coach Jenni Fink (by the way, if you need a Career Coach, Jenni is great, highly recommend!) posed a thoughtful question: What do you think of when someone says the word career development?

Source: LinkedIn

The poll got over 3,500 responses on LinkedIn (and counting!) which is pretty insane but I think speaks to the fact that it’s often a word that is widely known but not deeply understood. And furthermore, when it’s not deeply understood, the odds that people, especially employees, have a good handle on what it is and how to do it effectively drop significantly. 

Today, I’m going to share what I think career development is, and some of the things I have done to do it effectively, and provide resources, tactical recommendations, and links that you can use right away to start managing your own career development.

Note: The great thing about career development is that it is individual to each person, so I would love to hear from you about how you define it, and some of the things you do to effectively develop your career.

What is Career Development?

Let’s go with the textbook definition first, courtesy of The Balance Careers

Career development is the process of choosing a career, improving your skills, and advancing along a career path. It’s a lifelong process of learning and decision-making that brings you closer to your ideal job, skillset, and lifestyle.

As of now, the top choice in Jenni’s poll question is “opportunities to grow (roughly 64%) followed by “a plan forward (22%.) 

For me, my definition combines both of those facets, with a little bit of a twist. I think of career development as the process of self-knowledge, exploration, and intentional decision-making that shapes your career. It’s a combination of doing, learning, and reflecting, and continuously moving with intention to acquire skills, experiences as you navigate through work and life. It’s not a “one and done” but rather, interactive and continuous process. Career development, at its core, is about setting goals and acquiring the skills to achieve those goals. 

 

Why Does Career Development Matter?

As the author Carter Cast rightly suggests, “ideally, organizations would do more to foster career development But the reality is that the bigger burden is on employees. Workers at all levels must learn to identify their weaknesses, uncover their blind spots, and strengthen their skills.” 

In a world where the pace of change continues to accelerate, we all need to continuously and proactively acquire knowledge and skills in order to stay relevant. Furthermore, all of us have our own goals, for our life and the work. Putting together a plan for how your own growth and learning in your career will help you achieve those goals is a great way to ensure that you get the most out of the life that you have. 

Finally, and perhaps more pressingly, those of us who are in the workforce right now will at some point in our future change jobs and/or change careers. 

Furthermore, from an employer perspective, career development helps with employee engagement and reducing attrition. Employees often leave when they feel they are not advancing, and feel more engaged when they are learning and growing. In fact, research from Culture Amp suggests that the #1 reason why people leave jobs is because of lack of career development

What are some ways to manage your career development?

Over the years, I’ve tried many different tactics for proactively managing my career development. From this, I’ve learned what’s worked and what’s fallen short.  I want to share a series of tactics that I’ve applied to my own career development throughout the past 10 years in the workplace. I believe these are all things that could be used to help achieve your career goals. While not all of these will work for you, I believe giving them a shot can lead to better outcomes.

Build a Career Development Plan

This one is probably the one you’ve heard the most and most glaringly obvious but putting together a career development plan is a great way to ensure that you A) have career goals and B) are working toward their goals. As the saying goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

There are many ways to put together a career development plan. I’m not going to suggest that one is better than the other, only that you should find a template that works for you, and commit to it for at least a year to see how it goes. Here are a couple examples of people who have put together templates that you can try on for size:

 

Note: if you’re a manager or people leader, check within your company to see if there are any software, programs or offerings for your employees. There are a number of career development software tools out there such as 

How Do You Develop Your Career?

Consistent and Regular Career Conversations with your Manager

Good managers recognize that when they’re people are developing and learning, it keeps them engaged and interested in their work, which leads to productivity, engagement, and results. But your manager can’t do that, unless they know what your goals are. Setting up time on a regular cadence to specifically talk about your career development is a great way to keep the conversation front and center. If you’re not sure what to talk about, here is a great article on how to structure these conversations. Furthermore, if you have a career development plan, bringing it up and showing where you are with it is also a great opportunity. 

My one tip for advice: If it’s awkward, keep doing it regularly. One, it will eventually get less awkward, and two, if you keep putting it front and center, your manager will soon realize that you care about your career development and are making it a priority. Most good managers will appreciate any employee who wants to take ownership of their career, and will reciprocate. Note: If you need help structuring a career conversation, read this.

Conduct Career Development Self-Reflection Check-Ins

Each quarter, I schedule time to do a career check in for myself. This is a self-reflection exercise, and  during this time, I revisit the career goals I made for the year, see how I am progressing, and figure out how I am going to finish working on them for the rest of the year. In some instances, I will remove goals that no longer seem important, or have been achieved. I will also add in new goals, or prioritize where I want to spend my time, depending on what’s most pressing. 

 

Chat with Your Peers About Career Development 

When I worked at Deloitte, I started in a cohort and we all were around the same age and at the same level. This was helpful because it allowed us to build relationships and connect on a closer level. Even though we didn’t see each other often, we always found ways to stay in touch whether it was through calls and check-ins or through time spent together on Friday’s at happy hour. 

 

During my time, I developed a series of fellow analysts who had similar career goals as I did. We often would meet to talk about what we were working on, how we were progressing, where we would be stuck, and we’d offer to help each other out to make progress or connections. Having a trusted set of peers was valuable because of the insight and feedback, but it also helped me get unstuck and held me accountable toward working on my goals. On a number of occasions, I was able to get access to new opportunities, or build new relationships, or get new ideas about how to manage my career, just by asking others what they were doing.

 

Learn in a live Cohort

One of my favorite parts of business school was being able to take classes with really smart people, and getting the chance to learn from and with them. Finding ways to do this in the professional world has also been helpful for my career development. In my career, all the companies that I have worked at have had a portfolio of internal cohort-based training and learning sessions on a variety of topics and skills. The key is finding ones that make sense to you, and then committing the time to doing it. It can be easy to say that you don’t have time to learn, but I’ve found that when I approach learning as a core enabler of doing my job better, it helps me frame the time spent on learning as an investment in being able to produce great work.

 

The connections you make in these programs with your fellow employees are helpful to the learning experience, but also I have found to be helpful to my job. Often, out of these experiences, I end up working with some of these people on other projects, or at the very least, connecting with them down the road.  As a result of COVID-19, Cohort-based learning has skyrocketed, and there have been a number of interesting companies, programs, and startups who have entered this space around various different topics. Here are a few examples:

  • OnDeck – cohort based learning experiences with a strong community learning component
  • Section 4 – Scott Galloway’s cohort based learning experiences on business & tech strategy
  • Ascend – Shivani Berry’s cohort-based leadership development class for emerging female managers
  • The Grand – Venture-backed startup specializing in cohort based career and life development coaching founded by First Round Capital Alum Anita Hossain and Rei Wang

Attend Relevant Conferences

Over the years, conferences have been a great resource for career development. The ideas that have come from it, the people that I’ve met, and the opportunities that have arisen have opened numerous doors for me in my career. There are a lot of different types of conferences to attend and lately, for me, I’ve focused on honing my craft in my function/role. FOr example,  I’ve attended a ton of Product Marketing Alliance Events over the past few years, which has helped me as I improved my craft as a Product Marketer. I’ve even met some of the speakers through following up afterward, which has proven helpful to not only growing my network, but getting more tactical feedback or guidance on specific topics or interests. In a virtual or hybrid world, conferences are even better and more robust as organizations, companies and industries pivot to virtual engagement opportunities. Pro Tip: If you’re looking for conferences to attend that are relevant, check out these Places

 

Put on Events Yourself

If you can’t find a conference to attend or if you don’t have the budget to get into a paid learning class, create an event and find the people to come to you! Last year during COVID-19, I knew that people were struggling with their job searches, so I decided to create a virtual event where we had 3 panelists, all of whom were recruiters and talked about what their company was dealing with, and how to navigate the recruiting process during a difficult time. I had over 300 people attend the webinar and many said it was super helpful to navigate their own career search. I’ve also done smaller learning events. For example, someone on my team started a “brunch and learn,” where every month, someone teaches a short lesson on a specific topic relevant to marketers. 

Share Your Knowledge With Others

One of the best ways to know if you’ve learned something is if you can teach it to other people. It’s also a great way to build skills in public speaking, presenting, coaching, and mentoring. Finding ways to share your learnings through formal and informal mechanisms is a great way to develop yourself but also to help out other people. For example, at Salesforce, we’re given up to a week each year for VTO (Volunteer Time Off) I like to use my “VTO” hours to mentor and coach young professionals, which is a great way to do something I enjoy doing, help someone else, and also improve critical skills I need to develop my career. Tip: Not sure what to share with others or who to share with? Take a recent project you completed, build a 5-6 slide summary deck of the project, and the key lessons you learned, and any best practices, and then find 5-10 people who you think might benefit from learning about this.

Consume Relevant Content

Most people who care about their career are already doing this, but reading articles and books, listening to podcasts, or watching video content on specific topics that pique your interest is always a great start. While this will never take the place of actually doing the thing you are trying to develop (ex: if you want to be a great basketball player, you have to shoot free throws, not just watch videos of Lebron James) they can be helpful and interesting, as well as give you plenty of ideas. One way to make sure you are consuming the right content is by having a robust and relevant information diet. Making sure your inputs (what you are consuming) are relevant and robust ensures that you are consuming ideas that help spur your thinking and learning. For more on this, check out Nick deWilde’s post on The T-Shaped Information Diet.

Engage on Social Media with peers and experts in your industry

One of the benefits of social media and content platforms is the ability to engage and share ideas, knowledge and insights. This is the exact reason why these can be great for career development. Furthermore, it’s also a chance to connect serendipitously with people who you may not necessarily encounter every day. I’ve engaged online with a number of folks who I have never met in person, but because of LinkedIn, Twitter, or other platforms, I have learned immensely from. Each platform will have its own methods for searching and discovering content. Here are a couple recommendations for general career advice:

  • Jenni Fink – Career Advice, Career Transitions
  • Nick deWilde – Career Strategy and intersection of career and work

Conduct a 360 Degree Assessment  

Self-awareness is important, but sometimes learning how others see it is just as important and critical. One exercise I’ve done at multiple times in my career is a 360-degree assessment. Basically, I’ll reach out to people in my network who have seen my work and my work style to solicit their feedback. This is a qualitative survey of about 5-6 questions, and I’ll try to get a series of responses. While most of the time the feedback is not incredibly surprising, sometimes it’s hard for us as individuals to see how others might perceive us. Oftentimes, I find I underestimate certain strengths that I have, or something that I perceive as a strength, is seen in a different light. These inputs are helpful as I think about my own brand, as well as how I use my strengths in my job.

Create a Learning Log 

After working on projects or initiatives, especially after ones where there was a clear business impact, I make sure to write down the things I did, the specific tasks I executed, the impact I made, and then the key lessons that I learned. I call this a “learning log.” This is helpful because it’s so easy to move onto the next thing and to forget what you’ve already done. It’s also helpful because it shows you just how much you are learning and contributing in your current role. 

Think about where you are today, versus where you were a year ago. There’s probably a good amount of skills, experiences, or knowledge you’ve acquired and accumulated, and if you have a career development plan, the learning log can help you see just how much you are progressing.

Create a side-project

Zapier reports that over 1/3rd of Americans have a side hustle. These are great opportunities to take skills or to gain skills and to find ways to do them outside of your core day job. Over the years, I’ve done a number of side projects that gave me lots of time and reps to develop skills, drive more engagement, and in some cases, generate revenue. I’ve started blogs, written a book, built a podcast, started a YouTube channel, and got into career coaching among other things. It’s important to note that these don’t necessarily need to be for the sake of starting a side hustle or for generating income, but if it ends up working out that way that is certainly great too. In a world where there are lots of tools to create content, showcase your work, share it with others, and be recognized for your outputs, creating and building something that others can see is a great way to grow your career, and it may even lead to further opportunities. (Some resources are below)

 

Conclusion

If you’re reading this article, chances are you want to be successful in your career and to achieve great things. Taking ownership and intention around career development helps us define a direction to work toward as well as opportunities to move ourselves toward the goals that we have.

I’d love to hear what you think, and if you’ve tried that has worked, and hasn’t worked for your own career development!

 

Additional Resources