Design thinking methods for career planning
A self-paced guide for understanding your career intentions based on a GHC workshop.
Context: This article is based on a workshop originally created and presented at the 2018 Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, TX by Catherine Most (www.catherinemost.com) and Lindsay Gordon (www.alifeofoptions.com/) and has been translated to be followed at your own pace. It was designed and presented as an hour-long workshop with some partner work but can be done at any pace and with any number of participants.
We recommend performing this self-paced workshop every ~12 months in order to make sure your career still aligns with your values.
Can you apply design thinking to your career to improve outcomes and gain clarity? Absolutely! Come understand how to apply design thinking principles to ensure your career feels like a good fit. This self-paced workshop will empower you with a framework to make confident decisions in your career, including changing jobs, and finding the right position. Please download the worksheet to follow along with the exercises.
— > download Workshop Worksheet
Workshop Process
Design Thinking is a process of uncovering a deeper understanding of the problem and can be applied to many diverse problem spaces, like career planning. The most important part of applying design thinking is empathizing with yourself as the customer. Empathy can replace pressure and help us be less hard on ourselves. Empathy can also help us step outside ourselves to better understand the influences that make up the problem. This workshop focuses on the first two steps in the design thinking process — Empathize and Define. There are a few exercises to help you empathize with yourself as the user and build what you learn into a persona to be able to define your needs.
EXERCISE ONE — Identify Career Pressures
Everyone feels some flavor of career pressure, whether it’s from society, family, peers, colleagues or self-doubt. Let’s dive into a few types to understand and acknowledge how universal these themes are:
- Noise: This comes from the book Roadmap and is defined as “everything that comes at you, that doesn’t take your individual personality into account” — this is primarily pressure from family, peers, society or your own self-doubt.
- Self-Inflicted: Pressures we put on ourselves in the form of perfectionism, hours worked, tasks taken on, expectations we have about our roles, etc.
- “They always knew”: The assumption that successful people always knew what they wanted to do or always had a plan, which creates a pressure for us to know the plan.
- Passion: It’s not that you can’t have passion in your job but we put a lot of pressure on it! “Just quit your job and do your passion! Find your calling!” It makes it sound like we only have one passion and we should probably know it by now.
All of these career pressures make it difficult to know what is right FOR YOU.
Give yourself 5 min
Take a moment to answer the questions in this exercise. What pressures can you acknowledge? What is the unique flavor combination of the pressure you feel around your career?
EXERCISE TWO — Current Job Satisfaction
Give yourself 5 min
This exercise helps give us a baseline for our current job satisfaction — what’s working and what’s not working? Sometimes we get hyper focused on the downsides of a job, or alternatively, put a bandaid on a situation that really isn’t working. This exercise can help us really evaluate our job for what it is.
Go around each section of the wheel and rate your satisfaction in each area between 0 and 10, where 0 is not at all fulfilled and 10 is highly fulfilled. Write down a number and draw an arc corresponding to that number. This will give you a visual of your current job fulfillment.
Do it using gut feel as much as you can, since we’re really good at overthinking! Write down the first number that comes to you and if you’d like you can also make a few notes related to your satisfaction in that area.
Great! Now you’ve identified some potential frustrations or problem areas as well as areas of work that are important to you.
EXERCISE THREE — Values
Give yourself 5 min
One interesting way to discover your values is to look at the decisions you’ve made and how you’ve lived life so far. In this exercise, write down 5–10 life decisions you’ve made so far, anything that feels significant to you — could be choosing a college, moving to a city, leaving a job, taking time off, deciding to have kids, etc.
Now, take another moment to write down what motivations influenced those life decisions. What’s the reason you made the decision you did? It could be that you weren’t feeling challenged, you needed adventure, you wanted to be closer to community or family, the status quo was costing you your health, etc.
Finally, circle any words that look like they might be values! In the worksheet example, the values would be challenge, adventure, community and health). This gives us a first draft of what your values and motivations might be.
EXERCISE FOUR — Create a Persona of Yourself
Give yourself 5 min
A User Persona is a way of documenting the needs, behaviors and motivations of the target user — which is you in planning your own career!
Personas are traditionally used in a business sense from the user experience and marketing perspective to keep teams focused on who they are building for and why. They are usually created through many interviews to be able to identify your target archetype but you are one person and this is YOUR career so you are the only user that matters!
Your persona of yourself is important in distilling down what is most important in particular to your job/career. A persona also aids in succinctly communicating your story to others for feedback (like in an interview or with your manager, etc.). The most important part of the user persona is that it helps you focus on the core needs of the user (aka you) instead of all the pressure about what we SHOULD want in a job.
In the ‘Motivations & Values’ section, you’ll input some of the results of Exercise 3. In the ‘Pains & Frustrations’ section, you’ll input anything you learned about your frustrations from the results of Exercise 2. In the ‘Drivers’ section, you’ll indicate how important each of those factors are in your decision making and there’s room to add in anything else that drives you.
EXERCISE FIVE — Comparing Your Persona to Reality
Give yourself 5 min
Now that you’ve started building your User Persona, you’re starting to see what the needs, motivations, frustrations, and drivers are for your user (aka you). Based on what you have uncovered, now we want to compare your persona to the reality of your current role. If you’re motivated by growth, adventure and health, how many of those values are being prioritized in your current role? If autonomy is really important to you, what changes might you make to your current role?
Take a moment to think about the following questions:
- How does your persona compare to your current role/situation?
- What’s out of alignment between your current role/situation and your persona?
- What changes do you want to make/actions do you want to take based on that information?
Next Steps
If you take three things away from this experience, here’s what we want you to remember:
- Remember to be aware of the pressures that exist that don’t take your individual personality and needs into account
- Always be kind to yourself and use EMPATHY when thinking about job fit, just as we would when designing for a user and
- Honor your needs, your motivations and your drivers when making decisions
“When you remember that you are always playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself and designing how to express the amazingness of you into the world, you can’t fail.” — Designing Your Life
Ideate, Prototype and Test!
Above we have gone through the first few stages of the Design Thinking process which gives a great understanding of our problem. Next you can continue the process by coming up with ideas, prototypes and testing those out in order to learn more about yourself. Always continue to learn more about yourself!
Since this workshop was time-boxed to only an hour with an audience of ~650 people, we were not able to get through the entire design thinking process for career planning but if you would like to go further please follow some of the below exercises:
- Working Conditions Exercise from “What Color is Your Parachute” — This exercise will help you understand the working conditions you need in order to thrive in a new job
- Ideation on new roles — Looking at your User Persona, what other roles may be a good fit for you? What roles would prioritize your values? What roles would minimize your frustrations? What roles would allow you to have a lot of the drivers that are important to you?
- Prototype and Test — Designing Your Life has a great framework to think about prototyping: “Get curious. Talk to people. Try stuff.” What are you curious about that you can start to research? Who has a role in an area you’re interested in that you can talk to about their experience? What classes or experiences can you try out to see if they’re the right fit?
- Practice comparing your user persona to a few sample job descriptions and communicate what is and is not a good fit about each role.
- — How does the role align with your motivations and values?
- — How does the role relate to your list of pains and frustrations?
- — How does the role prioritize your drivers and areas of work that are important to you?
Feedback
We tremendously value feedback — Feedback is a gift!
Please drop us a line or comment below with how these career planning exercises went for you. We love to hear about what you discovered about yourself!
Additional Resources
We frequently get asked for more resources on the intersection of Design Thinking and Career Planning. Below we compiled a few of our favorites that will help anyone wanting to dive deeper.
Design Thinking
- “Designing Your Life” — Utilizing design thinking methods to the problem of your life (and many of life’s biggest decision points)
- The Design Thinking Method — Online courses by IDEO
- User Design Thinking to Better Your Career (article)
- Design Thinking for a Better You (article)
- Next Time You’re Making a Career Move, Try Design Thinking (article)
Career Planning
- 7 of my favorite books about career
- Making Hard Choices — TED talk by philosopher Ruth Chang about how to make hard choices, great framework to use in your career
- 5 Questions to Weigh When at a Career Crossroads (article)
- Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision (article)
- The Upside of Quitting (podcast episode)
- Ten Advantages to Hating Your Job (article)
- Job-Searching Resource for Women: ReBoot Accel sent out this fantastic list of companies who specifically focus on job placement for women so I put it in a doc here
