Career Roadmap

There are two aspects of career roadmapping:

  1. Progressing the role/team of application engineer (see our career levels page
  2. Thinking through longer term plans and how to move into something outside of the team

This page focuses on the latter.

Creating your career roadmap is deeply personal. This is about you, your life, your happiness. Your manager’s role is to help you think through what you desire for yourself and support you on your journey. How long it takes to develop your roadmap, how many sessions, and the end result of it will vary. It will depend on where you are on your journey already. It will also depend on whether you like to work toward big milestones or if you are more of an incrementalist and prefer to focus on one step at a time. The only measure of success is that the roadmap is useful to you in planning where you want to go and/or planning how to get there.

For the first session, come prepared with thoughts about the following:

  • What do you want to be true for your life? Answer this beyond just your career. Your career is one facet of your life and can easily take up more space than perhaps you actually want.
  • Do you have things important to you to do outside of work that you are working on now or want to work on soon?
  • What kinds of things do you find you like to do? Again, don’t limit this just to work things. Just think of all the ways you have and do spend time and what engages you, brings you joy, etc.
  • Do you have any financial requirements for yourself. You don’t have to share these, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle.
  • Do you have any other desires, requirements, and/or constraints you feel are important to this process?
  • How do you define success for yourself as a human? Many of us are conditioned to tie this to our job title and salary, which may be what we want, or may not be.

During the first session, you will be the one taking notes (this is your roadmap, after all). Your manager will ask more questions as you share your thoughts to help uncover all the puzzle pieces. Together, you and your manager will send the first session agreeing to the next step(s).

The end goal is to have an idea of what you are working toward, some immediate next steps you will take to get there, and how your manager will support you.