#31 🧭💡 Career Design 101
Links with Career Ops, Career Strategy and Career Development
One way to look at your career is to distinguish four facets:
Career Design - to clarify the way your career works and might work next
Career Development - to evolve various career aspects, like experiences portfolio, professional network, skills portfolio and so on
Career Operations - for doing well what you need to do daily, now
Career Strategy - for moving towards a better situation
Career Strategy is a facet of Personal Strategy, in the sense that it’s a personal strategy as a way forward in the context of your career.
Career Ops is crucial for reliably and consistently creating value, in your current career setup, for the various beneficiaries of your work.
Career Development is about learning, developing, changing, evolving important career elements so that you’re progressing in your professional life.
Career Design is about understanding how your career works now and about exploring options of how the various career elements might work together next.
Career Design Links
Career Design needs to:
Ensure Career Operations: the way your career works needs to ensure you are creating value for your beneficiaries in a reliable and consistent way
Support Career Strategy: the way your career works needs to allow space for progressing towards a better situation. Exploring and deciding on ways your career might work next need to be aligned with the direction offered by your Career Strategy
Sync with Career Development: the way your career works influences how various career elements evolve. The evolution of these elements influences how your career works and adjacent possibilities.
Career Design 101
The practice of career design is inspired from other design practices that are more established (like org design or product design). Which means it entails activities like:
Scoping - using design criteria like desired outcomes, constraints, guiding principles or test criteria;
Governance - for example, deciding how to decide about various career designs;
Diagnosis - using maps and models to understand how your career works now;
Divergence - exploring options, scenarios and what ifs;
Co-design - involving trusted people around you when exploring options;
Convergence - deciding on the option best fitting the design criteria;
Risk mitigation - testing, experimenting, iterating, piloting, prototyping;
Transition - clarifying activities that will help you progress towards the desired career design.
Like for any important aspect of our lives, there is certainly a lot of value in doing things intuitively and going with the flow.
Career design comes with a deliberate and intentional approach to help you both do great in the present and also be able to progress towards a better situation.
Hope this short will offer some good food for thought for approaching your professional life in these intentional ways. If this resonates, let me know via DM or comments and I’ll deep dive in these 4 areas (career ops, strategy, design and development) in future posts.
Keep on evolving,
Bülent
Bülent Duagi is a Sr. Strategic adviser for Tech companies and a lifelong learner. He works at the intersection of Strategy, Foresight, Leadership, Org Design, Product and Capability Development. Connect on LinkedIn and learn more by exploring his professional one pager.