Career Insights: Mind the Gap-Career Gap Analysis

Summer is a great time to think about your future and regroup your focus and efforts. Grab a coffee, glass of wine, or a mojito (whichever one is to your liking), and settle down for some quality alone time with yourself. Pandemic shook the world and your priorities and your view of life and consecutively on your career might have changed too. It matters not what position you hold, what industry you are in, and what is your seniority - identifying where you want to be and consistently moving towards your goal will preserve your energy for what is really important and will put your goals to action.

Gap analysis is a commonly applied method for organizations, and yet we almost never implement it in our own careers.

Are you planning to move to a different role within your organization, outside of it, or alter the course of your career altogether? Each of us goes through the reevaluation of career goals from the ground up at least once in a lifetime, yet how about we do so systematically every year of every 6 months? Since it’s quite inevitable it will happen, let me give you few tips on how to orchestrate such a review in your own time.

Take an A4 list of paper, divide it by 2. The left-hand side will be your ground 0, right-hand side -your future self.

Step 1: Outline your ground zero

• Where you are now in your career? What position do you hold/what project are you on? How do you work (office/remote)?

• How do you feel about your role and your project? Do you feel you are growing in your position and your knowledge or do you feel you stagnate?

• What’s the atmosphere is like in your current team - how do you like it?

• Ideally, what would you change?

Step 2: Define your future self

• Where do you see yourself in 2 years, what about in 5 years?

• What aspirations do you have? What skills do you want to acquire in the coming years?

• What lifestyle do you want to have?

• What values do you treasure in other people and leaders of the organization?

• What kind of organization do you want to work for?

• Where do you want to be based?

On the flip side of the A4

Step 3: Identify the gaps

• Identify the Gaps and prioritize them

• What needs to happen for you to achieve your objectives?

• Is it possible to make the first steps within your current organization?

• What skills do you need to improve to reach your desired place in 2 years/5 years?

• What are your actionable points right now in order to get you closer to the desired state? [you might want to draft a to-do list]