Map your Career River online
I’m thrilled to announce that you can now map your own Career River online!
Note: This displays best on desktop.
What does it mean to map your Career River? It means thinking about what progress meant for you during moments of transition, and revealing the journey that never shows up on a resume.
Here’s how my early career shows up on the ✨shiny new✨ Career River map site:
I want to offer my sincere thanks to Marita Pérez Díaz for building this visualization. You may remember Marita from our Q&A conversation on making a career transition after burnout. Ever since she came up to me at SRCCON last year to talk about Career River, she’s been a generous tributary for this work. Marita, your commitment and expertise is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Ready to get started? Here’s a handy two-step guide to map your Career River:
Step 1. Consider what career progress has looked like for you
Think about roles you have had. A role is a type of job you have done. You could list the official title for each role, which would be on your resume, or simply describe the type of work you were doing. This could be full-time, part-time, freelance or a side hustle. You can also combine similar roles into one (my “Editor” role actually contains three different titles on my resume). If you consider it part of your career, it belongs on the map.
Consider: How have you progressed throughout your career? This could mean mapping whether you moved up or down a traditional hierarchy, from entry-level to management to leadership, if that’s what mattered to you at the time. You could also have an idea of progress that’s more closely tied to your independence, or your ability to make an impact, or to enjoy pursuits outside of work. The great thing about this new online tool is, you can play around with different types of progress and see how your river changes.
We’re typically taught to consider our career progress in terms of status: getting more responsibility and more pay by moving up the hierarchy in our chosen field. But there are other options for measuring our success as well. Here are different categories of progress to consider:
- Status: more pay, more direct reports, moving up the hierarchy.
- Stability: getting a steady paycheck, knowing your position is secure.
- Skills: learning something new, applying existing skills differently.
- Satisfaction: greater flexibility, clearer alignment between your values and your work.
In general, for each line on your resume you likely have a sense of what represents a “step up” or a “step down” in your career for you. Just be sure you’re thinking about your real-life experience and not what others might see when they look at each role.
💡 It can be hard to decide how to define progress in your career. You may get stuck or feel lost. That’s a sign that you’re considering something in a new light — give yourself credit for trying and stick with it to see what you can learn!
What you consider progress will change over time. As you prepare to start mapping your career journey as a river, you’ll consider how each role represented progress at that moment for you.
Step 2. Map your river
Score your roles according to your definition of career progress.
Score each role on the chart based on your progress at the time. If you feel a role change allowed you to move forward, whether that was by growing your status, stability, skills, satisfaction, or some combination, give it a positive number for progress. If you felt like the role did not help you progress the way you wanted to at the time, give it a negative score to place it lower.
How to score progress: Most transitions will include multiple types of progress, so feel free to consider how the combination of several different forms of progress felt overall. Or, see if you had one type of progress that was your priority at the time. Did the change allow you to gain skills even if you lost some satisfaction? Then perhaps that meant overall progress if what you wanted most from the move was the chance to grow your skills.
What about salary? Depending on your circumstances, you might include salary or other benefits as a measure of stability (if you need a certain amount) or status (if you want more).
Your professional journey may well contain moments where your progress was stalled or you moved “backward.” This is not necessarily a bad thing. Our lives are complex and evolving, and sometimes taking a step “back” sets us up to be more fulfilled moving forward. I learned this when I left my first employer, a community newspaper:
Bridget Thoreson
This is a major departure from traditional thinking around career advancement up the ladder, and it may take a few tries for you to find the map that feels right to you. Play around with it!
I’d love your feedback on this exercise. Please feel free to download and share your map with me at exploreyourriver@gmail.com.
When you feel like what’s on the page captures your lived experience, when the ups and downs match your excitement or disappointment at different transition points of your journey, you’ve successfully redefined how you look at progress in your career.
🥳 You did it! Congratulations, and welcome to your Career River.
🎁 Special offer: Get the full guide
This map is just the beginning. I’ve created a guide to mapping your Career River to help you uncover translatable skills, identify areas of flow and challenges, and reflect on what you’ve learned, with example maps from fellow navigators. Claim a free 30-day trial as a supporting subscriber to instantly receive the worksheet download:
Happy navigating,
Bridget
Next Community Call: 🔥 Burnout 🔥
Supporting subscribers! Don’t miss our upcoming Career River Community Call, where we’ll discuss recognizing, responding to, and recovering from burnout. This call will be at noon ET/9 a.m. PT on Wednesday, July 16.
This is a subscriber benefit for paid supporters of Explore Your Career River: Register for this call series and join anytime you can. I’ll record my comments for registrants, but the Q&A discussion will not be recorded.
Get weekly career support and inspiration in your inbox: