Career Audit: The Final Countdown
This is the final article in a three part series about career audits, prefaced by why you should audit your own career regularly. In the first article I breakdown the three things you should do to get started, and in the second one I shared a checklist that has served me well in regularly assessing if I'm on track (hint: I'm not always but this helps me know). In this final piece, I want to share how to make career audits a sustainable and regular part of your professional career path. To figure out what makes habits or activities sustainable, I like to understand what causes us to fail at maintaining habits. These reasons are unlikely to be new to you but are worth the reminder when planning for your long-term career.
A: Not understanding what creates and maintains a habit:
This piece talks about the three components of a habit, a useful breakdown of what we see as a single-piece component of our lives:
- The Cue or Trigger
- The Action
- The Reward
To make career audits sustainable in your life, it is important to know what motivates you - for example if you are content where you are and don't anticipate change or movement (retirement is an example that comes to mind), very little is likely to serve as a cue. Unlike a sudden trigger which can be very impactful (layoffs, moving to a different city etc.), cues for things that happen regularly are calmer. If your job is just fine as of today, it will take you more effort to translate this cue into action. The rewards are also not immediate -- they *may* materialize in an obvious manner, and if they do, it won't be the near future.
Our brains often choose instant gratification over long-term gains (this piece talks about how to balance the emotional and logical parts of your brain).
B. Thinking you can go at it alone
There are some of us who make up our minds, and are able to stick to habits without fail. But for the rest of us, having partnership or community for our careers is a key factor for growth and success. This is tricky as well, because the collective benefit only works when everyone commits. If you show up for monthly chats with your colleague about your professional development goals, while they flake last minute, that's not great for the habit either. I think this is one of the trickiest things: finding the right people who are partners and sounding boards for your career, and needs a couple of attempts. It also changes with your circumstance in life -- what helps in grad school may not serve you as you are reentering the workforce after a long caregiving leave.
This is a great list-driven piece on how to find the right accountability partner. Don't underestimate the value this can bring. I'm also bringing together a small group to hold each other accountable - sign up at bit.ly/careeraudits
C. Declaring failure too soon
What I have learned about myself is that having visual streaks of habit formation help me, and there is a 99% likelihood that I will break the streak more than once. What I have had to shift is to interpret that first failure as final. If I had to drop out of a professional development course because I did not plan well for it, the temptation to believe that I simply can't do this while working full-time is high. But it is also inaccurate - what is true for today does not have to be true for tomorrow in this case.
If you miss taking stock of your career once a month, do it the next month. Do it once a quarter. Spend 15 minutes on it compared to an hour. Use an app as a reminder if partnering with other people doesn't work for your life. There are many, many steps between a setback and an unchangeable failure.
A lot, if not all of this, is transferable learning around habits. Owning and regularly assessing the status of your job, your professional development, your career can seem boring and not rewarding: here's the thing, there is nothing wrong with that. Not everything is or has to be exciting, perhaps what you learn is that your career choices so far have been right for you, that there is little that you have not already planned for. Not everything around our careers has to be earth-shattering; what you want to do is surprise-proof your career as far as possible. Perhaps you can't predict what changes the post-pandemic world holds for your work but knowing that there could be change is one step away from possible unpleasant surprises.