September always feels a bit like a new year to me. This is partly the school year starting again and the quiet house as everyone gets back to it, and partly the world of work getting back into a more typical routine.
Several people I’ve spoken to recently have come back from holidays, or from work being quieter or just different across July and August, and it’s left them thinking about things they’d perhaps been too busy to give enough attention to before.
For a few of them, somewhere in there, is a version of the question we were all asked when we were younger – what do you want to do when you grow up?
Except by the time you’re well into your career, it can sometimes feel as though you really ought to have a concrete answer by now. If you’re someone who likes to reach an answer and tick the box, it can be tough to still be searching.
Sometimes we may fleetingly feel that we do have that answer, and then things around us change, and what was right before isn’t right any more.
How long does the answer need to last?
When we’re trying to work out what we want to do next, I think there can be a tendency to look for that right answer. The career direction that makes sense of everything we’ve done so far and gives us a clear path for the next ten or fifteen years.
What if we’re asking too much of the answer, though?
If you found a role, organisation or direction that broadly met what you wanted and needed for the next five or six years, would that really be a bad outcome simply because you needed to think again at the end of it?
A lot can change in that time.
What you want from your career at 40 may not be what you want at 45 or 50. Values change, financial positions change, children get older and so do parents, and the amount of responsibility you want, the flexibility you need and the things you find interesting or worthwhile can all evolve.
Work isn’t standing still while we’re doing all of that, of course. Restructures, new technology and particularly the pace of development in AI mean that some of the roles and opportunities we’ll be considering in five or ten years may look quite different from the ones we’re considering today.
Perhaps the useful kind of career clarity is less definitive than we assume, and comes down to getting clear enough about what matters now to make a good decision about what comes next.
There are things we can know
That doesn’t mean giving up on having any kind of career direction.
One of the things I often do with clients is look back over their career and identify their core career themes. What are the repeated threads in the work they’ve enjoyed and been good at? What seems to bring out the best in them? What has consistently mattered?
Alongside those sit our values and some of the practical things we need from work. Financial security might matter, flexibility might be essential and we may want challenge, autonomy, variety, influence or the opportunity to build something.
Some of those things remain consistent over time and others don’t – my own attitudes to the first two, financial security and flexibility, have changed a good deal over the last 30 years.
It’s useful to know our core themes and values, because when work starts to feel off, we have something to check it against and a way to work out why.
Has the work changed and moved further away from the things that matter to us?
Have we changed, perhaps, while continuing along a career path that suited an earlier version of ourselves?
Being strategic about your career
I’m not suggesting we should all be constantly analysing whether we’re in the right career – that sounds a bit exhausting.
There is a risk, though, that if we ignore the strategic thinking and go with the flow, or tackle every decision tactically, we end up with quite a big divergence between where we are and where we want to be, and no real clarity about how to cross that gap, or even how to define it.
A couple of times a year, it can be worth lifting your head up and asking yourself three fairly simple questions:
◆ What matters to me now? Are the things I value, enjoy and need from work broadly the same, or has something changed?
◆ Where am I trying to get to? Not necessarily a particular job title, but what do I want more of, less of, or to be different over the next few years?
◆ Is what I’m doing taking me in roughly that direction, and if it isn’t, what actually needs to change?
Sometimes you’ll go through those questions and conclude that everything is broadly where you want it to be.
Sometimes the direction is still right, but you realise you aren’t doing the things that will help you get there. Perhaps you need to build different experience, strengthen particular relationships, become more visible or start having conversations outside your immediate network.
Sometimes you realise that what you want has changed, but the path you’re following hasn’t caught up yet.
You don’t necessarily need to wait for the twice-yearly check-in either. If dissatisfaction is becoming a regular feature, if you keep finding yourself looking at jobs when you don’t really know why, or career change stories are suddenly holding your attention more than they used to, that’s worth paying attention to.
What do you want to do when you grow up?
I’m not sure any of us needs to have a definitive answer to that.
If September has got you questioning your own career direction, perhaps you don’t need to start with what you should do next. You could start with what matters to you now, and whether your career is still giving you enough of it.
If those questions are bringing up more than they’re answering, this is exactly the kind of career thinking I work through with clients. Feel free to get in touch if a conversation would be useful.
You might also find these articles useful
◆ When Career ‘What Next’ Thinking Isn’t Turning Into an Answer – on using a structured approach when thinking about your career direction isn’t producing a clear answer.
◆ Redefining Success – When the Framework No Longer Quite Fits – on what happens when the version of career success you’ve been working towards no longer feels right.
◆ Lifting Your Gaze – Why Strategic Career Thinking Shouldn’t Wait – on making space to consider where your career is heading before circumstances force the issue.