Most people give serious thought to their career direction twice a year, in January when the new year makes goal-setting feel worthwhile and at year-end when a performance review makes it compulsory.
The months in between tend to pass without really considering your career path, which means that by December many people are reconstructing what happened through the year and their contributions to the business from memory rather than reporting on something they have been actively managing.
Mid-year is a useful moment to interrupt that pattern, with enough of the year behind you to have real data on where things stand and enough ahead that a course correction can be made.
In this post, we share 5 questions to ask yourself to conduct a quick mid-year career check-in.
Contents
- Are you still working toward the right goals?
- How strong are your key relationships?
- How visible are you to the people who matter?
- Has your compensation kept pace?
- What are you actually learning?
1. Are you still working toward the right goals?
The goals most people set in January tend to reflect what felt important in December, and by mid year the context has usually shifted enough that the connection between those goals and your current reality is worth re-examining.
A project may have changed shape, or a conversation may have altered what you actually want from the year. Most people do not formally revise their goals when this happens, which means they either continue directing effort toward something that has lost its relevance or they have simply stopped thinking about their goals altogether.
The more productive question is whether the things on your January list are still the right things to be aiming for, and if the context has changed enough that they are not, whether you have replaced them with something more accurate. The year-end career audit covers a fuller version of this exercise.
2. How strong are your key relationships?
Careers at senior level move on relationships as much as on output, and yet most professionals do not actively focus on the health of their key working relationships.
The question you can ask yourself is whether the people who matter most to your career have an accurate picture of what you have achieved and where you are trying to get to. If your manager does not know what you want from the next 18 months, or if a key stakeholder relationship has become purely transactional, addressing both now gives you time to do it properly rather than having to repair a relationship under pressure.
Managing up covers the practical mechanics of building a strong working relationship with your manager, and the same principles apply to the broader set of relationships that shape your career at this level.
3. How visible are you to the people who matter?
Even if at senior level excellent work does not automatically make you more visible.
Work at this stage tends to be strategic and relational, which makes it harder to observe from the outside than the work you were doing earlier in your career, and strong contributions can go largely unnoticed by the people whose opinion of you matters most.
The relevant question is whether the people with influence over your next opportunity have seen enough of your thinking, judgement and work to advocate for you if the moment arose, and if the honest answer is that they have not, the second half of the year is the right time to address it.
4. Has your compensation kept pace?
If you have taken on substantially more responsibility or moved into a broader scope of work since your last pay review, it is probably time to do some research on compensation for your role before a performance conversation happens rather than arriving at it unprepared.
According to data published by the Office for National Statistics, the gender pay gap persists even at senior professional level, which is a further reason for women at this stage to be proactive about ensuring their compensation reflects their current contribution rather than waiting for the organisation to adjust it.
Most organisations do not proactively revise compensation for people who do not make the case for themselves, and the people who tend to get the most from pay conversations are the ones who arrive having already built a clear argument.
The approach behind a 75% salary increase over 2.5 years covers this in detail, but the starting point now is simply knowing your current position and being able to articulate the value you have added since it was last set.
5. What are you actually learning?
This is the question most people skip, partly because it feels like a luxury when there is a great deal to deliver and partly because at the senior level the honest answer is often that you are not learning very much.
Roles at this stage can become almost entirely about execution, managing a team and stakeholder management, with less opportunities to stretches your thinking or build a new knowledge you did not already have.
Whether a role is still worth your investment depends significantly on whether it is developing you in some meaningful way, and the learning versus earning framework is as relevant in all roles and all career stages. Noticing that a role has stopped offering either one of those things gives you time to think about what to do, rather than arriving at the same conclusion in December when the year has already been spent.
None of these questions requires a formal process or a full afternoon, but they do require honest answers and a willingness to act on what those answers reveal.
Continue Reading
- The 4×6 Method: Your Strategic Roadmap To Career Acceleration A structured framework for thinking about where you’re going and how to get there
- The Relationship Management Hack That Changed How I Network How to build and maintain professional relationships that actually support your career
- Tired Of Being Too Available At Work? Try These Boundary Setting Techniques Practical strategies for protecting your time and energy at work
- The #1 Simple Thing You Should Be Doing To Get A Promotion Why tracking your accomplishments is the career move most people overlook
- The January Advantage: Why You Should Plan Your Career Moves In Q1 How to use the start of the year to get ahead of your career goals
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