Creating your Career Map
The energy industry provides opportunity aplenty to enjoy a diverse and fulfilling career. From investment and development through to EPC and Asset Management, ambitious employees wont be short of opportunity.
For those of you with specific ideas of progression, growth, and even a desire to reach the top of the tree in your specific industry, career mapping can be a valuable tool in sense checking your career development against your goals.
What is a career map?
In essence, it is a roadmap that provides you with a direction of travel, that should make achieving those lofty ambitions more realistic. For those with a specific destination in mind, mapping out how to get there is good practice.
Never done this before? Here are a few handy tips to help you along the way.
10 steps to create your Career Map
1. Identify your ultimate career goals:
Start by identifying your long-term career goals. Consider what you want to achieve in your career and what you aspire to be known for in the industry.
Do you want to be become a head of department, function director, or C-suite executive? Do you understand the sacrifices you might have to make in order to reach your desired goal?
2. Assess your current skillset:
Take an honest assessment of your skills and abilities. Identify the things you are good at and highlight areas of your experience that evidences this.
3. Conduct a skills-based gap analysis:
Identify what you need to improve upon, and what skills you need to acquire to reach your ultimate career goal. Be ruthless here. Unless you can convincingly demonstrate evidence of a skill whilst in an interview scenario, you need to continue to develop that area. Involve industry peers that you trust to be honest with you, in a supportive manner.
4. Create a development plan:
This is where it gets interesting. Now you’ve identified the skills and experience you need, you need to identify where you are going to get it.
Can your current employer provide the breadth of work that will enable you to gain what you need? Do you need to look elsewhere to get involved in different types of projects/competencies? If so, what types of organisations will allow you to gain those elusive skills? It pays to get specific and even draw up a list of names and target companies.
5. Draw up a timeline
Now you know what you need, and have a rough idea how to get it, you need to create a timeline. Being proactive is an advantage. You don’t want to bounce from business to business every 18 months under the guise of attaining new skills, but equally, procrastinating when the time is right to move won't aid your cause. Be as honest as you can with your current employers. Seek out opportunity to grow where you are, and if that isn’t possible, be willing to look elsewhere.
6. Seek out mentors
Mentorship is criminally under-rated. A good mentor can offer valuable guidance and insight on how to develop the skills and experience needed to reach your ultimate career goal. Find mentors who have achieved the career goals you aspire to reach. They will help you to review your skills-gap analysis, development plan and timeline, filling in any blind spots you might have. Approaching these individuals might seem nerve racking, but you'd be surprised how open people are to supporting those earlier on in their career.
7. Focus on the end-goal rather than short term gain
We all know there is someone out there who will throw an extra 10k at you to do what you do now, while wearing a different colour hat. If your goal is to make as much money in the short term in your current position, then great – have at it.
If you are single minded in your pursuit of your end goal, you might find yourself accepting an offer with a slightly lower salary that gives you the exact environment you need to develop a specific area of competency.
8. Get comfortable with failure.
Not everything you do is going to be a roaring success. If you are pushing the boundaries of your own skill-set, some of the results may be less than ideal. Providing you manage expectations in the correct way, the right employer will facilitate your growth by supporting your development into new areas.
9. Be willing to ask for help
As with point 8, pushing yourself to develop new competencies means you will rarely be the expert first time round. Be willing to lean on others who have trod the path before you, and recognise their contribution to your own development.
10. Review regularly
In reality, our goals change as life moves forward. The drive you have now to reach the pinnacle of your industry, and the sacrifices that requires, may not be there in 5 years time, when other aspects of your life look different. And that’s okay.
It’s important to master our goals, and not be mastered by them. Review regularly to reflect the outcome you want.
Some food for thought
Career mapping is a great exercise, but it can come with an added layer of pressure. For a lot of people, enjoying the ride and seeing where you end up is the right way to look at your career.
For others who are naturally more goal orientated, a career map is a great way to see those goals realised.
We'd love to hear your thoughts
Looking for a sound-board whilst thinking through this process? We'd be happy to use our extensive experience supporting the careers of energy & infrastructure sector professionals. Feel free to reach out and we can arrange a time to speak.
