The 6 Big Questions You Need to Answer When Navigating Your Career

Have you ever asked yourself…

Where is my career going? Am I making the right career moves? What should I even be basing my decisions on when making a career move? I spend so much time at this job, what am I working towards?

I recently was going through a career transition, and I found myself constantly trying to figure out how to best navigate the paths in front of me. I found a lot of people around me were trying to do the same.

When determining what to do with your career, it is hard to focus on what is important. Below, we will look at 6 questions you need to ask yourself before you take your next role.

Q1: How much do I care about what my company does for the world?

In the 2016 Cone Communications Millennial Employee Engagement Study, a reported 3/4 of employees consider the social impact of a company when determining where to work.

2/3 of employees won’t work for a company that doesn’t have a strong corporate responsibility.

Another question is how much do want to be centrally working for a company that is creating this social impact. You could work for a clean energy company, a company that directly provides food for people in need, or a company that educates children who otherwise wouldn’t gain an education.

However, these companies frequently gain money based on donations, and the compensations and budgets associated with these efforts tend to be a lot tighter than those of other companies.

Alternatively, companies like Google, Amazon, Nerdwallet (one of my previous employers), and so many other companies do a ton to partner with local and global nonprofits and provide their own internal efforts to improve the world. Nerdwallet matched any 1k dollar donation to a charity of an employee’s choice each year. Additionally, each quarter Nerdwallet would partner with a nonprofit and employees would use a workday to perform work for the nonprofit — like making backpacks for schools or providing food at a local food bank.

There are organizations within each of these companies focused solely on improving the world we live in. Even if these efforts aren’t central to the way these companies make money, you as an employee have the opportunity to make the world a better place. Determining how central these societal efforts are to your daily job is something you need to decide for yourself.

Q2: Do I like this team and manager?

In 2019, the Frontline Leader Project published a study called Exploring the Most Critical Segment of Leaders that found 57% of employees quit their jobs specifically because of their manager. Needless to say, your manager is often extremely important in determining how enjoyable your day-to-day is at a company. However, what people sometimes forget is that your manager is also the main person determining your future success at a company.

Inc. published an article entitled Why Finding a Great Boss Is More Important Than Finding the Perfect Job, and in my experience, they’re right! Finding a great manager and team can help you understand new paths to success. You might find a new passion and use it to kick start a different career trajectory altogether.

Ultimately you need to find a team and manager that jives with you. Maybe you like someone who will help you guide you through your projects ensuring your success. Or perhaps, you prefer a manager who gives you a project and stops by at the end to see what you’ve produced. Regardless, try to determine how you would like your teammates and manager to react to certain situations, and ask questions to elicit their reactions to these scenarios during your interviews.

For me personally, finding a good team (including the manager) is the most important aspect of making a job choice. I use all of my question time at the end of interviews to dive into better understanding my teammates and what their relationships are like with the team manager. Poor team dynamics are a reason to find a new place to move your career.

Q3: Do I want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?

There are pros and cons to being either a small fish in a big pond (working at a giant company with thousands of employees) or being a big fish in a small pond (working for a company with less than a thousand employees). In this section, we will explore the pros and cons of each.

In general, performing in each of these roles can have a positive impact on your career growth. Ultimately you will need to find what seems like the best next step for you, so let’s look at what each of these options looks like.

If you take a role in a giant company, there are a lot of advantages. You have the advantage of learning from other talented individuals all around you — you will see different methods of leadership that you can learn from. You will learn how large companies are organized, and you will see all the different pieces that go into making a giant group of people function towards common company goals. These companies frequently treat employees well, and they often allow a strong work-life balance for employees.

At a large company, you often are given a more strict role to align with, so you often have less room to be creative and solve big questions associated with the company. Additionally, many of the big questions associated with the company are already solved, so you often will work to maintain existing solutions. There is frequently more hierarchy involved in making decisions, and therefore, more politics involved before projects can be tackled with many stakeholders being involved.

In smaller companies, you frequently have the opportunity to wear multiple hats. Your personal growth and learnings have the opportunity to grow very quickly and in multiple directions. You have the opportunity to drive core company decisions and build the company in directions you think are best.

Unfortunately, with smaller companies, you often need to work a lot more hours. You may experience more stress, and in times of economic turbulence, your entire company may fold. The reality is that the make or break of the company is much more on your shoulders, and there are pros and cons associated with that reality.

Q4: What do I want to do in my day-to-day?

A 2017 survey by the Robert Half OfficeTeam showed that the average employee is bored for more than 1/4 of the hours in the workweek. Furthermore, 2/5 of employees suggest they are likely to quit a job due to boredom. Boredom may occur for multiple reasons, but largely these cases may be avoided by signing up for a role that aligns with your day to day expectations.

Do you want to work in research behind the scenes on new ideas and new product lines? Largely, you may be guarded against lots of meetings, but you also might find yourself missing that personal interaction. You will have lots of room to try many things, but you won’t have anyone necessarily there to guide you in the right direction.

Perhaps you want to work directly on the core of a product? Here, you likely will have lots of meetings. You will need to compromise with others, collaborate effectively, and work on menial tasks that are necessary for a product launch.

There are lots of additional routes also exist. Maybe you want to work on company strategy? Maybe you want to improve the optimization of key algorithms in your company? Or maybe you’d prefer to work at the head of a team, who focuses on communicating with stakeholders and ensuring team alignment?

If you work for a small company, you may have the opportunity to wear all of these hats, but for most roles, you will be operating only within a small window of the above roles. Try to figure out what you like doing, and navigate towards those opportunities.

Q5: How much do I want to be compensated?

It’s no surprise that compensation is one of the most important factors associated with looking for a new role. There are a ton of tools on the Internet for understanding the amount earned by employees in similar roles at companies around the globe, as well as the additional perks a company may provide.

Often additional perks might include healthcare, commuting stipends, phone stipends, gym stipends, education stipends, free meals and snacks, dog-friendly campuses, and so many more. These perks can help you understand what is important to the company and the employees that make up these companies.

At the end of the day, you want to make sure you are fairly compensated for your level and role; but at the same time, don’t let compensation be the sole driver for making employment decisions. Use glassdoor, levels.fyi, LinkedIn, and other salary comparison tools to assist you in negotiating if you feel you are being unfairly compensated.

Ask yourself how much do I need to make to meet my financial goals for independence and maintain my lifestyle? Is taking a less than desirable position (even for a short time) worth extra compensation?

Q6: Where do I want my career to go?

Once you have landed somewhere and you begin to grow your skill set, take the time to understand what you want to work on and what motivates you to do your best work. Understand what sets you apart from your peers. What do you want to be doing and how do you get there? If you are already doing what you want to be doing with people you like working with, consider yourself lucky! There are a lot of people who aspire to be in your position.