How to manage your career and personal growth
In the past, I often found myself wanting to take charge of my career and personal growth, but I’d end up procrastinating or just going with the flow. Instead of managing things proactively, I would react to situations as they arose. When I transitioned into management and started having deeper conversations about career development with the people I support, I realized I wasn’t alone.
In 80% of these conversations, I encountered awkward silences and a common refrain: “I’m not sure—I just want to do my work.” Yet, when someone leaves a company, one of the most frequent reasons cited is a lack of career progression and growth.
This experience made it clear to me: the absence of a structured system to manage and predict one’s career growth is a significant factor in this problem. By analyzing how different components interact and influence one another, I developed a system to address the challenges I faced—and it’s helped others too.
The journey
The journey of managing a career and personal growth consists of three main blocks:
- Understanding your values and principles
- Building a map to guide you to where you want to go
- Identifying the gaps and tools needed to progress along that map
It’s important to note that the answers to these steps will evolve over time. Therefore, building a feedback loop into this system is crucial to ensure regular updates and course corrections.
Understanding your values and principles
The first step in owning your career is understanding what truly matters to you. A helpful tool for this is Brené Brown’s Living Into Our Values exercise.
I highly encourage calibrating this exercise with a manager, mentor, peer, or friend. This builds self-awareness and establishes a foundation for future collaboration and decision-making.
Building your career map
Your map is your guide to where you want to go. This involves three key exercises:
1. What is important to you?
Reflect on how your work can support your life and list your priorities. Examples might include:
- Financial security
- Supporting your family
- Learning and growth
- A flexible schedule
- Doing impactful work
- Visibility and recognition
2. Where are you now?
Evaluate your current role and situation through:
- Role evaluation:
- What’s great about your role as it is?
- What do you wish were different?
- Career check-up interview:
- Answer guided questions to reflect on your current status. You can use the Career Checkup Template by Will Larson or create your own set of questions.
- Competency self-assessment:
- If your company has a competency framework, make a self-assessment based on it.
3. Where do you want to go?
Ask yourself this opening question:
“If things stay exactly as they are now, would you stay for another month? Six months? A year? Five years?”
Your answer often helps clarify your vision and what you want to achieve.
Identifying gaps and tools for progression
Once you have your map, the next step is identifying what you need to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to go.
Personal Development Plans
Create a plan outlining the skills and capabilities you need to develop.
Track your growth using 3 key metrics (on a scale of 0 to 5):
- Are you learning? Are you growing?
- Are you gaining transferable skills or just learning how to cope with your current job?
- How confident and capable do you feel in your role?
Over time, you will identify patterns and see correlations based on your answers.
Build your “brag document”
Document your achievements and milestones. This not only builds confidence but also creates a clear narrative of your progress. Julia Evans has a great post about brag documents that you can use for inspiration.
Create a rhythm
A structured rhythm helps create predictability, ensures accountability, and keeps you moving forward. My rule of thumb is:
- Revisit your values and principles annually.
- Rebuild your career map every 6 months.
- Review your progress quarterly (every 3 months).
Final note
Managing your career isn’t about finding all the answers upfront—it’s about consistently reflecting, planning, and taking small steps forward. The goal of having a system is to ensure you’re not just reacting to opportunities but actively creating them.