If you've ever struggled to answer questions like "where do you want to be in your career in 5 years?" that your manager asks you after you have had like 3 years of experience in the industry and are just starting to maybe not panic about taking down production, try this:
- Figure out your baseline goals for your job. Money to live is one of them for almost everyone. Another might be a thing that makes you happy at your job, like getting praise from teammates or learning something technically complex. Another might be something that you don't like that your job helps you avoid, like avoiding dealing with customers by working stock in the back. Write these down.
- For each one of these, figure out something that could change in your job that would get you more of it. A promotion might get you more money. Working on internal tools might get you gratitude from your coworkers. Becoming a manager might help you be more involved in planning.
- See if you can envision a single job that would check all these boxes. If so, that might be a good career goal! If not, try to figure out changes to your current job that would get you closer to the goals, like moving teams or learning a specific tech stack, and reevaluate after you've made that progress.
Steps 1 and 2 are a bit "draw the rest of the bird" but that's why it's a short post baybeeeeeeee. Even coming up with a vaguely systematic framework for career planning was a huge help for me when I was first trying to figure out what comes next.
