In just two short weeks 2019 will have come to an end. Two weeks! How fast the year has gone. When it comes to your career, have you had a great year? A good year? Or are you counting down the seconds until you can start afresh in 2020?
Over the next few weeks and months we will be sharing tips, insights and advice for moving your career to the next level in 2020. However, before you can start planning for the future you need to assess where you are right now and how this year has been for you career-wise. In other words, you need to do a career audit!
The idea of auditing your year might be a little overwhelming, so we have put together ten questions to ask yourself to help get you started. The purpose of these questions is to prompt reflection on your accomplishments, your challenges and your current role.
A couple of quick tips for answering the questions:
- Answer in terms of your career. This isn’t meant to be an audit of your life. You can do that another time.
- Be brutally honest with yourself. If it has been a bad year, say so. You need to be open and honest in order to best understand where you currently are in your career. Once you know where you are starting from you can begin to plan the journey to get where you want to go.
So, in terms of this past year, ask yourself:
- What have been the biggest challenges for you?
- What have been your greatest successes?
- What is your favourite thing about your current role?
- What are you known for in your team and in your organisation?
- If money wasn’t an issue what would you do?
- Can you see yourself in this career for the next 20 years? If not, why not and what would you prefer to be doing?
- Are you happy with your current salary and/or benefits? What would you change?
- What new skills did you develop or new experiences did you gain this year?
- Identify three things you wish you had done, accomplished or asked for this year.
- On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being unbelievably bad, how would you rate your year?
In the end, how you rated 2019 in terms of your career doesn’t really matter too much. In two weeks it will be a new year and an opportunity for a new start for your career goals and dreams. Acknowledge and accept the difficult aspects of the past twelve months, then let them go and look ahead to starting clean in 2020.
The most important thing in terms of your audit is to clearly identify what worked and what didn’t work, what you did well and what you learned over the last 12 months. Once you have these clear in your mind you can start planning for the year ahead so that you can start 2020, at least in terms of your career, with a bang.
