While Grug focuses on helping individuals understand how they are performing day-in and day-out, it is also important to have a grand vision for your career. The benefits of creating a vision for yourself is not unknown but still studies show that 50% of employees do not have clear career goals.
“Where do you see yourself in X years.?” is the cliched question that interviewers love to ask due to the insights it can reveal about the candidate even if the response is well prepared and rehearsed.
There are quite a few techniques to come up with a solid response to this question that can help you get through interviews. But if the intent is to have a clear vision for yourself that is easily actionable, then we recommend this technique of retro-mapping your career.
Retro-mapping is inspired by the concept of Retrograde Analysis where one visualizes how they want their end state to look like and then retraces the steps from the end state to the current state to identify what has to be done to get there. This is a famous training technique used by chess champions.
We can apply the same technique to our careers - determine where you would want to be in 10,15 or 20 years and backtrack from your desired future state to the present which reveals the clear next steps for you to reach where you want to be.
Since LinkedIn is our professional calling card, you can try to create the LinkedIn page of your desired future state. You can create a dummy profile in LinkedIn for this exercise or simply use the template that we have created for this exercise.
