‘Tis the season for Career Reflection
With 2020 around the corner, now is the perfect time to set aside some me-time and understand your core interests, talent, weaknesses, and short and long-term goals to achieve your career aspirations.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your career, or you’ve got a wealth of experience under your belt, career reflection is probably one of the most crucial parts of a successful career strategy. It involves taking a critical look at what is most important to you, and how you define your skills, personality and values within the workplace. Below we’ve summarised a few methods you can use to help you on the path to self-reflection;
Find a Mentor
Being able to talk through and reflect on your experiences with a mentor is one of the most powerful ways you can develop within your career. A mentor will provide you with insightful information and advice — helping you to discover your strengths, develop your skills, and explore what you do and don’t want/like during your reflective process.
Most people who have been lucky enough to access a mentor early on in their career have found that they have been able to gain a clearer career direction and set achievable goals to reach their aspirations.
If you don’t currently have access to a mentor or coach and you’re not sure where to find one, then the University of Birmingham offers a number of different mentoring schemes which are definitely worth checking out — even as a graduate.
Ask for Feedback
Feedback from peers is a great way to help you begin your reflection — deciphering what is working well for you and where you can make changes.
If you’re not keen on contacting your peers directly, then perhaps ask your line manager if they can ask around and collate this feedback for you.
Just make sure that you learn from it in a positive way, for example, if you are critiqued on your time-management, don’t then wage a personal vendetta against them, but instead use this to address how you can improve these skills in the future.
The ‘Problem, Action, Result’ Formula
Take a moment to consider a few key accomplishments or challenges that you’ve faced this year. For each one, define the problem or task, describe what action you took, and then summarise the results. By doing this, you’re recognising what you’ve learned so far, and you can begin to identify how you can use these experiences to tackle any future challenges.
Top Tip: Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. This exercise can be really useful to look back on if you’re struggling to find a solution to a problem, or even to use when you next come to reflect on your career and review the progress you’ve made.
SWOT Analysis
It’s highly unlikely you’ve made it this far in life without someone at least mentioning SWOT analysis. But this method can come in extremely handy during your reflection process.
Rather than looking at particular situations, as described in the ‘Problem, Action, Result’ Formula, you can use SWOT analysis to consider your strengths (what you do well), weaknesses (what you could improve), opportunities (what opportunities are currently available to you to help you develop), and threats (what threats do your weaknesses reveal to you).
