Deciding to change direction in your career can be daunting, which keeps people in jobs or industries they don’t like. At any age, many are looking for answers to the perennial question: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ When contemplating this question, what is important to remember is that you can’t solve a problem you are not prepared to have. If you are too scared of making a change or don’t know how to, you are destined to stay trapped in the endless cycle of work, eat, sleep, repeat—suffering in an unfulfilling job making you miserable.
You can adopt a Design Thinking approach to working out what you want from a career and how to get it, an exploratory process that draws upon skilled designers’ mindset. Cultivating and mastering strategies for unlocking creativity and taking an approach of curious confidence to the unknown. By eliminating the fear of trying new methods and potentially failing, then starting again. All in the name of problem solving and innovation.
By borrowing some essential design tools like reframing problems and prototyping experiences, we can creatively chart the course of our careers. Follow these few steps:
Step 1
Discover
You can’t know where you are going until you know where you are! In this discovery stage, we need to admit we face a problem (a job or career we no longer want to be in) and unpack that problem. Asking some questions like ‘What needs to change?’ ‘Who is involved, and what are their needs?’ ‘What do they think and why?’.
Step 2
Define
Defining the problem comes from analysis and reflection, and by understanding what is known about the situation. Consider ‘Who?’ ‘What?’ and ‘When’ and then reframing into problem statements.
Step 3
Develop
In this stage, we generate ideas, make selections, and test the limitations of our ideas. The develop stage involves prototyping conversations and experiences and considering the resources required to make a career pivot.
Step 4
Drive
Now we start to test our ideas, gather new information, integrate the feedback we have learned along the way, and refine our approach.
Adopting a mindset of curiosity, having a bias to action, reframing problems, and accepting that it is a process that unfolds, will support your efforts in charting a new career course.
We all have the power to affect change within our own lives and make meaning of our circumstances. A career coach can act as a facilitator to assist you on this critical journey.