Our alumni navigate many transitions — personally and professionally — over the course of their lives.
As you navigate any transition, it may be helpful to articulate or reconnect with your career and life vision and adopt a bias toward action.
Articulate Your Career and Life Vision
Having a career and life vision gives you the ability to see your work and career — what you do and where you do it — in a way that is personally meaningful, stimulating, inspiring, and fulfilling, and in alignment with who you are.
Many successful managers and executives will tell you that they did not have plans for their careers or specific career goals. Rather, they had an idea (an image) and an understanding of what they liked and did not like, as well as some general guidelines for how to lead their work and personal lives.
As such, having a career and life vision is not the same as being able to define a specific job in a specific industry at a specific company. That may be a career goal, but it’s not career vision.
Having a career and life vision is essential for you to find job satisfaction and success. It is a road map for where you want to go, keeping you focused on your long-term objectives, so that you’re not pushed in other directions.
It can be quite challenging to define your career and life vision on your own. A career coach may be the best resource to guide you through this process. It will take time for you to develop your career and life vision, but it’s an investment that will pay dividends over your entire life.
Exercises to Develop a Career and Life Vision
Embrace a Bias Toward Action
Alumni Career Services has been collaborating closely with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the d.school) to leverage design thinking as a principle to manage one’s career and life. Design thinking is a method of innovation that relies heavily on rapid prototyping and testing of new ideas, which can be applied to a career as readily as it can to a product or service.
