Have you had a career conversation recently? They are hugely valuable in helping you think about your career and what you want. We plan so much in our lives. We plan our families, our holidays, even our meals but we often don't put energy and intention into planning our careers.

When you don't plan then the result can be poor career decision making which might mean you end up:

• In the wrong job

• Not performing well in your job

• Hating what you do

• Promoted without the necessary skillset

• Falling into a career you're not sure about

• Following someone else's career dream (often your parents)

• Taking the first job after graduating and getting stuck on a career path that doesn't feel right.

Having a career conversation can make such a difference to your career planning and decision making.

A lot of people think it's the conversation at the end of your yearly appraisal discussion where you book onto a training course. It's not!

It's a whole separate conversation that should be happening around 3 times a year with your manager or coach. It's a conversation that engages and empowers you to drive your career forward.

Ideally, a series of career conversations would cover:

• The Past – how you got to where you are, what can you learn from your journey, what resources do you have? And what skills and experience have you brought with you.

• The Present – where are you now? What possibilities and options are available? Where are you in relation to where you want to be?

• The Future – what does future success look like? What impact do you want to make? How can you get there?

Research shows we could have up to 5 different careers in our lifetime. These could be changes or pivots and having the space to talk about options and work out what we want is going to be invaluable at all levels in the organisation.

There are many benefits including:

• Feeling empowered to take ownership of your career and to see the possibilities for growth and stretch. Realising you can grow towards your career dream while staying in the same role is very motivating.

• Being able to understand and value your journey so far. We are so focused on 'what next' that we don't always take time to reflect and value what we have achieved so far or the level of resilience and tenacity we have developed.

• Having the freedom to ask for opportunities and stretch

• Receiving guidance and support to plan what you want

• Developing a career activist approach to your career and realising you can create what you want by driving it forward.

Career conversations are a brilliant tool for employee engagement and retention of talent. If employees can see a pathway for their career in their current organisation, they are more likely to stay. Right Management carried out research in 2016 with employees having regular career conversations that demonstrated that:

• 75% of staff would be more likely to stay with their organisation

• 76% staff would look for career growth within their organisation

• 82% felt more engaged with the work they did

• 78% were more likely to share their ideas

The knock-on effect is an increase in productivity and skill development. Organisations will get more lateral mobility as employees feel empowered to try out different areas of the business, which ultimately results in a more agile workforce.

If you're feeling more empowered to be proactive in your career development, you also need to think about your progress and success differently. If you have already created your career success definition then that's a good place to start, (read my blog on creating your career success definition).

Then think about career development within the 3 E's framework: Experience, Exposure and Education. Don't just book a course, consider how else you could develop that skill. For example, if you want to improve your project management skills you could do a course but you could also talk to your manager about running a new project with different challenges and/or mentoring a junior project team member.

This is your career so you shouldn't expect your manager to have all the answers or drive the conversation. Their role is to facilitate your thoughts, offer suggestions, open doors and help make connections. You need to come to the meeting knowing what you want help with.

If you want to find out more about having a career conversation with me book a discovery call here.