Your Future (Work) Self
For reentry employment planning, I like to use five years. A goal is set five years out from the beginning of the reentry process and then reverse-engineered back to the present.
“This five-year goal includes the work you want to do, where you’d like to live and the person you want to be.”
Thanks for reading Get Beyond It All! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
In reentry terms, it is a long-term goal. In life terms, it is a mere chapter in someone’s personal story.
That’s reentry, but the idea works equally well for those changing careers or starting out, say, recent grads. It’s helpful to visualize the attainment of this goal—to see your goal, yourself achieving it, and the route you will take to get there. Visualization of this type is used successfully in sports psychology, business, health and wellness, and many other areas.
It's all good, but I want to focus on the path taken—the route. Setting the end goal and seeing yourself reaching it in a mind video isn’t that hard for most people. The route to get there, however, can be another matter. Surprises always happen along the way; this is where most of us swerve off the road and lose out on achieving our goal.
What follows is a simple exercise designed to narrow down the route to your goal, the trickiest part of this type of planning.
Step 1
Start with your five-year goal and, using thoughtful best-guessing, list in reverse order three or four jobs you think you will have from your goal to today. Consider each job to be 12 to 18 months in duration. Add details to each role, but don’t get hung up on this step.
Step 2
Repeat this process, but start from today and work forward to your goal. This time, include more details about the duties you will perform, the team you will be part of, the size and location of the company, etc. Think more about the duration of each role, adding start and end dates for each. This list should look like your work history listed on your future resume.
Step 3
You now have a sequential list of the jobs you will have, each a progressive step toward your goal. To move from one to the next, you will need references from people with whom you have work relationships. Ask yourself, “Who will I need to connect with at each job to help me move to the next?” Imagine who these two or three people might be and list them in Step 2 for each position.
Step 4
After reviewing your list, put on your best-guessing hat again and jot down things that could happen during each job that would challenge you to get to the next. Be creative here, but keep it real! As noted above, this is where many plans fall apart. Unanticipated and unexpected things make it hard to progress to the next job. Think deeply about this step.
Step 5
Look over what you have created. You now have a route map with dates and details covering the jobs you will hold from today until you reach your five-year goal. You have thought about the people connections you will need to make and some possible things that could require adjustments and workarounds to stay on course.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Why go through this exercise? There are many good reasons; here are a few:
The first reason is to visualize the route, not just the end goal, with you giving yourself an attaboy/attagirl pat on the back. Instead, you’ve created a first draft of your personalized job roadmap.
The second drives home the importance of defining your starting point on this journey: your first job and your Job Search Objective. Needless to say, starting off on the right foot is crucial; that’s why having a Job Search Objective is non-negotiable.
The third reason is that it transports you from visualizing to actual planning. Sure, it is a draft, but it is your draft. You own it. In a way, you are now like a startup. You have a goal, a plan, and a starting point. You are prepared to make course corrections and small pivots along the way, but you intend to stay the course and reach your goal.
Reentering, transitioning careers, or just starting out—you, the startup, are ready to launch.
PS - This exercise exemplifies something many might consider but never do. However, folks reentering, transitioning, or panicking about starting out, on the other hand, are sometimes freaked out enough to dive in and imagine the route needed to reach their goal. They do it, and they benefit. They are one step ahead and more aware of what might lie ahead.
Onward!