Crafting your career timeline
Crafting your career timeline
5 minutes
What made it so special? Was it the team you worked with? Maybe the type of work itself? The clients / customers you got to deal with? The feeling that you were making a difference? Now consider the worst job you’ve ever had. What’s the reason for why you disliked it so much?
Both of these experiences will have helped to shape the person you are today, as well as given an idea as to what you’re hoping for, or hoping to avoid in your next job. Given that these roles were the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs that you’ve had, you can probably articulate these learnings quite clearly.
However, what about all of the other positions that you’ve held? All of these would have contained ups and downs, likes and dislikes. The question is, have you ever stopped to consider the question ‘what have all of my favourite jobs had in common?’
When in the midst of a career transition, people can often fail to see the proverbial ‘forest for the trees’. In other words, we can become so fixated on specific elements of our resumes, such as our last 1 – 2 positions, it can prevent us from truly reflecting on what we want out of a career.
Taking the time to understand your career journey to date, your experiences, and your accomplishments, can make a big difference to the decisions you make about your career for the future.
Plotting a career timeline can be a simple and effective way to identify the types of roles, tasks or responsibilities that align with your abilities, beliefs, preferences, and values. It can also help you understand the type of workplace culture you enjoy or the organisational values which resonate most.
Through recognising the different highlights in your career to date, as well as the periods where you felt less fulfilled, you can start to draw insights about the elements which impacted you both positively and negatively. These insights can help you determine what you want to incorporate in the next stage of your career.
