Your Career Strategy - A Decision Making Framework
In this article I'd like to give you a framework on which you can think through your career strategy. To find out how you can decide where you might want your career to take you in terms of the skills you'll want to use and the industry sectors in which you'll work - read on and all will be revealed.

Firstly, click here to open a pdf version of the Career Strategy Framework, on which the below descriptions are based.

Strategy 1: Existing Skills in Existing Industry Sector
You will see that continuing with a career within your existing areas of knowledge and competence is clearly a good place to start. You have skills and experiences that your existing or new employers would be willing to pay for and you really have two choices here. Firstly you can continue to do the same role, but choose to do it in a different organisation (i.e. a competitor) that may well have a location, culture, pay scale or values that suit you better. Secondly you can look for promotion in your current company, doing the same role, but with more responsibility and (hopefully) for better money.

Strategy 2: New Skills in Existing Industry Sector
Your next easiest choice in terms of developing your career strategy revolves around staying where you are in terms of industry sector and organisation, but looking for a shift in the type of job that you do. For example, if you're in sales, you could make a play to move more into marketing or from admin to, say, accounts. The benefit of doing this within your existing organisation is that you have a track record and your current employer is much more likely to try to accommodate your wishes to keep you (assuming you're a valued employee!) than an entirely new employer is likely to employ you in a role in which you have no experience. This is by far the easiest way for you to shift job type.

Another scenario may be that you are looking for a promotion that, due to the more senior nature of the role, will require you to be taking on more managerial responsibilities. If this is the case for you, please don't underestimate the need to develop specific new people management and managerial skills, as they will be very different from the more functional role you will have been doing beforehand. One way to make this change is to ask to manage a newer or more junior member of your department to begin with, and go from there.

Strategy 3: Existing Skills in New Industry Sector
If you like, and are good at, the job you do, but want to work in a different sector or environment, the key task here is to first look at customers and suppliers of your current company (known as moving up or down the value chain). You will be able to make this move because you will have some credibility in the same industry sector and you may even be able to sell your different perspective on the industry sector as a key skill.

If you want more of a move, you can look at companies who are in a parallel sector, that is, companies who may be selling different products or services but who are selling them into the same markets as your previous company. Failing this, you may just need to rely on the specific job skills you have to get a job in a completely different industry sector.

Strategy 4: New Skills in New Industry Sector
This choice really is the great unknown, and many people worry unnecessarily that their ideal job is hiding somewhere in this box! Unless you have an identified dream or passion that is miles from your current job in terms of skills needed which will require a complete change, you can manoeuvre yourself towards this box by first using career strategies two or three as described above. This is why I often advocate to clients without a definite identified dream or passion that they start to evolve their career through strategies two or three above and then re-evaluate their position once there.

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