Career dreaming, negotiation and disaster preparedness

Here’s how to kickoff 2023 by planning your professional future.

Thinking about your professional future can be daunting, but a little bit of intentionality and imaginative reflection can help you navigate your next step.

Seasoned product professionals Susannah Locke and Amanda Yarnell shared tips on career dreaming, preparing for negotiations and safeguarding against layoffs in a News Product Alliance community event held on December 6th, 2022. 

When designing your career future, it’s important to collect data. Locke created a career exploration checklist to use as an information-gathering opportunity for both internal motivators and external opportunities. Understanding how you’re feeling in your current role can guide your next step, she said. 

She also uses the list for “disaster preparedness,” meaning to safeguard personal assets and contacts in case of layoffs — knowing how volatile the journalism industry is. (After the event, Locke was one of the around 130 of Vox employees who were laid off, proving the importance of always being prepared. Locke is currently looking for her next opportunity. Feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn if you have one in mind.)

Locke said she created this checklist to jumpstart this thinking gently — without committing to the idea of leaving your current job or even looking at job descriptions right at first.

“I was kind of allergic and terrified of the idea of trying something else,” Locke said. “This came from trying to find really lightweight, non-scary, curiosity-driven ways to gather evidence that I could react to.”

But even if someone isn’t currently looking for another opportunity, doing some of this prep work now can equip them to identify their next opportunity more easily, Yarnell said.

Looking inward to identify your skill sets and interests alongside what kind of work energizes you is like “developing a pair of glasses” that enables you to recognize opportunities as they emerge, Locke said.

Career Dreaming

This step is all about understanding where you’re at and where you want to go, Locke said. The more you can arm yourself with knowledge, you can help chart a course toward where you want to go professionally.

Her first step — writing five feelings you have at work now and five you want to feel in the future. Locke recommends also employing another framework to mine insights from the past to plan the future called the Year Compass booklet, a free resource to plan the year ahead, which includes taking a look back at your calendar to see how you actually spent your time.

Be curiosity-driven, she said. Look for prospective jobs or sectors but let your natural wonder of what it’s like to be in that role drive who you talk to. Talk to people within the spaces you’re interested in to better understand where you might want to look.

Second, it can help to look externally for what inspires you. Locke practices creating a “word list” — a collection of verbs and descriptors that seem inspiring or interesting. 

Guided by curiosity, create a document of verbs from LinkedIn bios and job descriptions that describe work you might want to do one day. Think about the roles you play both in your job and in your personal life. Think about all the things you do at work. Generating this list can help you identify patterns to use when thinking about new opportunities.

Yarnell added that she keeps a folder where she saves interesting job descriptions to revisit and a spreadsheet with her wins at work — two tools that can serve both as a reference for creating application materials and also as inspiration for potential areas to explore.

Negotiation pre-prep

After you’re sure you know what you want to do, it’s time to figure out how you want to do it, Yarnell said.

Preparing yourself before even receiving an offer can help you ensure you leave negotiations in a better position. It can also help remove some of the emotion behind it by being intentional instead of reactive.

“It’s important to stay neutral and not to waste your emotional energy in the early stages,” Yarnell said. 

When approaching negotiations, it’s important to consider if the role is a culture fit, she said.

To come prepared to the negotiation table, figure out what you want. Not just salary or benefits but also work-life balance, culture and understanding how the role fits into your life. 

It’s also important to consider who your potential manager would be. One tool shared by Locke is called the Manager Voltron — a resource stemming from the idea that no manager can fulfill every need. This tool can help identify what you’re not being currently fulfilled in by your manager as well as where you can find that support, Locke said.

“It’s important to know your boss can’t do everything for you,” Yarnell said. Fulfill those other needs by building your professional network.

Disaster preparedness

This section of the list was inspired when Locke was feeling uneasy about the stability of the industry. But instead of sitting around worrying, she decided to create a plan of action to safeguard against being laid off.

 “I decided to take out my freakout energy and use it to make this list,” Locke said. “We all know layoffs can happen with no warning and then you have no access to your stuff.”

In addition to saving enough money for a cushion — Locke says common guidance is three to six months of living expenses, or as long as you think it’d take to land another job if you lost your current position — speakers outlined two important things to archive. 

First, your contact info for any colleagues or professional contacts if your position disappears overnight. You might lose access to your accounts before you can save them, she said. Second, Yarnell suggests ensuring social and community-based Slack accounts are linked to your personal email.

Locke reminded event attendees that career planning is an ongoing process. It's okay to break it down into smaller steps if it's more manageable. By being curious, reflective, and proactive, you can set yourself up for success in the year ahead.