Career checkup template.

career (44)

Fork this template!

At Uma Chingunde’s suggestion, the learning circle I’m part of is doing a short detour on career trajectory, and I’ve written up a short template to use. This is similar to a career narrative, but with more focus on self-diagnosis than something presentable to others.

I’ve been experimenting with reusable templates over on Infrastructure Engineering, and decided to try something similar here. (That experiment is itself inspired by Brie Wolfson’s use of templates in The Kool-Aid Factory.)

Screenshot of career checkup template on Google docs.

There’s no “perfect template” for this kind of thing, but after giving it a test run, I personally found it useful. If folks have other templates they’ve found more useful, please send them my way and I’ll collect them here as well!

How to Use

  1. Fork this template!
  2. Look through the sections. If there are any sections that don’t resonate with you at all (as opposed to just feeling hard to fill in), then remove or edit them. It’s just a random template, not something sacrosanct
  3. Fill in the sections. Feel free to jump around to answer the parts that you have the most energy for
  4. Revisit a few days later: anything you want to change after sleeping on it?
  5. If possible, find peers or friends to share and discuss each other’s checkups together
  6. Store it away somewhere to review a year from now