Assess and Plan

Career WayFinding -  Decide What's Next and Move Forward

Career Wayfinding is a skill.  It is the ability to build your way forward while navigating the complexity of an ever-changing future of work.  When you wayfind you are using what you learned from sense-making and meaning-making to take one step, one experience at a time, then assessing, planning, and adjusting your course to move you forward.

This approach empowers you to be comfortable with not knowing where you are going and teaches you to see a direction and use your compass to navigate not one singular best career, but multiple career challenges you to contribute to. 

It's important to understand that you are not picking one job title to have for the rest of your life. You will have dozens of job titles throughout your life.

To design and build a path that leads toward something meaningful, you are constantly making decisions about what's next? What do I want to learn? What experience do I want to acquire? How do I want to develop myself?  Over time your goals evolve as you celebrate your successes and most importantly learn and grow from failures.

To engage in Career Wayfinding, consider the following:

1. Complete the Challenge Card Sort Activity in 'How to find challenges to work on?' or use one of the many other resources to explore interesting career challenges provided. Then learn more about the challenges that are meaningful to you by researching these area(s) of interest:

   • Learn more about the problems and opportunities of this challenge(s).

   • Who are the organizations and employers engaged in this challenge?

   • Who are the interesting people and roles working on this challenge?

2. Brainstorm ways to move your challenge interests forward. Ask yourself how you have already engaged in this challenge, and what else you could do to learn more?

   • Work: part-time work, summer job, contract, entry-level role, or internship.

   • Academic: courses and experiential learning (curricular and co-curricular) as well as clubs, societies, conference opportunities.

   • Community: informational career conversations, volunteering, co-curricular activities, a mentor relationship.

   • Further Education: a course, graduate program, diploma, certificate, certification, micro-credential, MOOC course, book, webinar.

3.  Assess your successes and failures and new information you have learned and experienced, adjust your plan, and move forward to What's Next:

   • What did I learn?  What more do I want to learn?

   • What experience have I acquired and want more do I want to acquire? 

   • Who am I becoming? How do I want to develop myself?

Education for Purpose

Is further education right for me?  As an early career starter, it is okay to wait.  Experience and perspective are great guides for decision-making about what further education looks like.  Researching LinkedIn profiles, you will quickly notice it is common to return to school after spending some time in the workforce to understand where you thrive and what the educational pathway for your goals looks like.

Is further education is right for you? Check out this awesome career tool and explore the questions and resources to help you understand more about further education pathways. 

Exploration is the fun part where you get to try new and different things!  Learn to be adaptable, iterate, expect change, and opportunities will be found. "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." - Arthur Ashe