Are you a career adventurer?

It’s time to think of your career as an adventure.

Often when we think about careers we think about a climbing a ladder.

Yet the reality for many of us is that a safe and sturdy ladder doesn’t exist. Consequently, the next step on our career path is often uncertain or unclear.

At Tailored Thinking we find it useful to think of your at a career as an adventure, or set of adventures . An adventure is exciting, bold and sometimes scary. There are opportunities to take risks and to learn and develop.

Rather than having an expectation that your career should be neatly defined, thinking about your career as an adventure encourages you to grow, learn and develop.

The (fabulous) team at Amazing If, encourages to consider our careers as squiggly. Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis talk about why people should embrace squiggly careers.

Firstly, they believe that a career is personal to the individual, there is no one size fits all career. Secondly, having a squiggly career enables and encourages people to develop in different directions. Sarah and Helen explain this further in their TEDx talk.

Thinking differently about your career

Here are 2 exercises to get you started to think about different career options, pathways and adventures.

1) An exercise for crafting your career adventure

This exercise involves peering into the future and considering what you might be doing from a career perspective in 5 , 10 or even 25 years’ time.  We recommend sketching out 2 or 3 different career scenarios or adventures you might have. Questions to consider are:

• In 2 – 25 years’ time what would be your dream job be internal and/or external to your current organisation?

• What will you be doing – what would a typical day or week look like? (what will you be doing, who will you be engaging with, what knowledge and skills will be using)

• What skills and experiences will you need to develop further to be able to fulfil this career adventure?

Having a clear image of a future work self can enable and encourage us to create, find and seize opportunities to do things in our current jobs that we might not otherwise have had the courage or conviction to try.

2) Craft your career with job crafting

The secret of many people with fulfilling and engaging jobs isn’t that they have waited to find the perfect job, instead they have created, or crafted that role themselves. You can read about job crafting in more detail here.

One way to take positive control of your job and career is through a concept called “job crafting”. Job crafting enables us to find opportunities for growth and innovation from within the jobs we already have.

Some questions that might get you started with job crafting:

• What skills or knowledge are you most interesting in developing further? Why is this? (skill crafting)

• What are your strongest relationships at work? (relationship crafting)

• What relationships would you like to build further? (relationship crafting)

• What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment in your work? Why do you think this is? (purpose crafting)

• What changes could be made to your job to improve your health and wellbeing? (wellbeing crafting)

If you approach job crafting with a combination of curiosity and commitment you start to shift your work in a positive direction that will make it more enjoyable and stimulating in the present and ultimately more rewarding in the future.

Careers are things that you build rather than things that you are given. Whether linear, up, down, small, big or simply squiggly we wish you all the best with your career. Happy adventures.

To learn more about job crafting and how it is linked to career growth and progression you can download our free job crafting guide here.

How to stimulate job crafting - an exercise for individuals and teams.

An exercise to stimulate job crafting.

Numerous people want to improve their work. A challenge for many is knowing where to start. This blog shares a simple exercise starting point. It is focused on encouraging you to identify the elements of your job that you want to change and improve.

We created this small, practical exercise to demonstrate how you can make small changes that can have a big impact.

Stage 1 - Identifying what you want to change.

We encourage people to consider 5 questions around 5 themes to identify opportunities and areas for change, personalisation and improvement (displayed on the image above).

• What do you want to grow / promote?

• What do you want to takeaway / reduce?

• What can you change / improve?

• What do you want to maintain / persist and keep doing?

• What do you want to pause / stop?

Stage 2 - Identifying the how.

Having identified the areas you want to change, the next step in the activity is to identify how you might do this.

To make the change sustainable and manageable we recommend you make one small change at a time. Approach any changes with curiosity and a mindset of experimentation.

The activity can be found here.

Why personalising work matters

Personalising your work around your personal strengths and preferences is called job crafting.

You can job craft by making small changes to your job to adapt and align your role with you as an individual.

Job crafting is a science backed concept. It helps you to thrive in your work, boosting engagement, wellbeing and overall happiness.

The idea is around boosting, growing and promoting the areas of your work that you enjoy and that give you energy.

For example, in Rob’s TED talk (5.45 - 6.48) he shared the example of a marketing director called Joanne. Having done this exercise, she identified that she wanted to grow and find more opportunities to informally connect with her colleagues. She did this (the How) by informally finding opportunities to connect with different members of her team each day.

Taking action

Three things you can do are:

• click this link to access the exercise

• identify what you want to change

• set a specific goal which captures the change you are going to make

Stay in touch

We’d love to hear about your experiences with this exercise so please connect with us and let us know.

If you found this exercise of value then you may also enjoy our ‘Love and Loathe’ exercise.