Squiggly Career Summer School: Possibilities

In our final week of Squiggly Career Summer School, we talked about how to explore your progression possibilities. You can watch back our 30 minute Instagram Live discussion here.

In Squiggly Careers, tools like career plans can hold us back. They are too rigid for us to be resilient and fix us to a future that rarely exists in the way we expect. Blinkered career plans make us vulnerable to change and mean we miss out on opportunities for our development.

Proactively exploring our possibilities and being actively curious about our career enables us to develop in different directions and reduces the risk our our career stalling.

In our discussion we shared 2 ideas for action to explore your progression.

1. Career Scanning

By collecting jobs that intrigued us (regardless of level, location or experience requirements!) we can use them as data points to develop our own unique career criteria. We can use this criteria to talk about the sort of roles we are interested in, rather than having to talk about the exact job we’re planning to do. This enables you to have much more open career conversations and more people will be able to help you.

All you need to do is collect 5-10 jobs that intrigue you (we prefer to use LinkedIn to search). Highlight the skills, requirements and role elements that energise you and create a master list of your must haves. Use this list next time someone asks you what you want to do in the future. Your response might sound something like ‘I’m not fixed to a specific role, but I’d love to explore opportunities that have elements of (must have 1/2/3)‘

2. Career Scoping

Challenging yourself to think about the different directions your career could develop in will help you understand more about what progression feels most interesting to you and what knowledge gaps you might need to fill to better understand your future fit.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What feels like the obvious move for you to make in your career?
• What feels like a more that would be interesting but a bit out of reach?
• What would feel like a pivot possibility for you and your career?
• What would you do if you do anything?

Write down what more you need to know about these possibilities to rule them in or out of interest. This could include the experience and expertise they might require or more insight into the day-to-day reality of the role.

Finally, think about who could help you fill your knowledge gaps and get in touch with them to have a curious career conversation!

You can listen to episode 220 of the Squiggly Careers podcast for more insight into this topic.

We hope you’ve find our Squiggly Career Summer School series useful!

Helen & Sarah