Should I stay or should I go?
Part 2: Where should I go?
TL;DR: Deciding your next career move is stressful, so here is a template to make it easier by taking into consideration your values and important wants and needs.
In my previous post, I shared what some may call the emotional story as to why I started considering another role last fall. But how did I overlook the emotional side of things and make an objective decision in what was best for me and my career? Enter the handy dandy “Career Framework”! (Cue the round of applause)
Contrary to my enthusiasm above, Career Framework is nothing but a fancy name for a giant Excel sheet I put together to evaluate a company or offer. This sheet includes a list of characteristics and how each company is ranked in terms of that characteristic. I often advise fellow engineers through their offers and career change decisions but I find that they themselves have a hard time putting into words what exactly they want. This framework or sheet forces them to think about that and objectively compare each company.
Story time!
To best illustrate this framework, showing an example is best. However, I cannot/do not want to share my actual Career Framework for various reasons. Instead, being the over the top imaginative person that I am, let’s walk through an example using a fictional software engineer who is not too different from me.
JC is currently working at Dunder Mifflin (you know the one). She isn’t very happy there and gets the sense that if she stays any longer she might be stuck and not be very marketable. So, she decided to take the plunge and start considering other roles. While corresponding with recruiters and applying to various places she puts thought into her Career Framework.
Step 1: Know your personal values
This may seem superfluous, but I find that knowing what you value most in your life makes it easier to be sure you are happy with your career decisions or really any decision. I have DevColor to thank for this. To put it into perspective, 2 of my values are Stability and Security. I like to have a stable and secure job and more importantly my life goal is to be financially stable and secure to the point that I only work because I want to not because I have to (FIRE anyone?). This means, I am likely to be more stressed or anxious working for a small start up that could go under any time rendering my equity in the company useless.
Knowing these values and keeping them at the front of mind during this process will come in handy later when determining which companies to even consider and also how to rank them. Note, it is also likely not all values will be applicable when determining a new career move.
What are JC’s values?
For our example engineer, some of the key values she identified with are Autonomy, Challenge, Meaningful Work, Learning, and Growth.
Step 2: Define key characteristics
We can determine these key characteristics by considering what things tie directly to your values, what things you do not like about your current or previous role, and what you need/want at your next company.
What are JC’s key characteristics?
In JC’s case, based off of her values, she is looking for a place that gives her an opportunity to learn, to grow as a mentor, have a manager that will respect her autonomy (Leadership Style), challenges her (Expectations of role) and allows her to have some kind of impact through meaningful work (Impact/Excitement of Product). JC really likes the consistent and light schedule of her current role, the diverse office, and the fact that she will not have to onboard/on ramp to a role if she were to stay at Dunder Mifflin. She despises the PTO offering, culture, and the inability to work from home. JC also loves traveling and thinks it would be cool to travel a bit as a part of work. Check out her list below.
- Leadership Style
- Expectations of the role
- Impact
- Excitement for product
- Opportunity to mentor
- Opportunity to learn
- PTO
- Compensation
- Travel
- Diverse company
- Culture
Step 3: Weigh each characteristic
Sometimes it is hard to make a decision when we treat every aspect of the decision the same. This is where associating a weight to each value comes into play. This could be as easy as ranking the characteristic from most important to least important and assigning a number based on its position in the list with the least important with a weight of 1. It is completely up to you if you want to add a weight to each characteristic and how much to add. For me, it did not make sense for compensation to be on the same level of importance as having the ability to mentor for example.
How did JC weigh her list?
JC broke her list into 4 groups each with a weight from 1 to 4.
Step 4: Rank each company
Now is the fun part! I would recommend determining what 2–3 companies (max of 4) you would like to include in the excel sheet. Filling in the excel sheet can be pretty extensive and there is no point in doing this process with any company you are not seriously considering to save some time and energy. I would also suggest including your current company in the comparison as well. You never know! Maybe going through this process will reaffirm for you that you are in the right place for your career.
With each characteristic, rank the companies against each other. No need for you to come up with an actual number or score which makes this process harder. Just say Company A is 1st in a characteristic and Company B clearly comes 2nd and so on. This makes it easier to be objective (Four Weddings on TLC is a real live example of this :D). If a multiple companies meet the same kind of requirement and are equivalent in some characteristic, it is acceptable to rank each company the same in that characteristic if you cannot differentiate between either company.
Continue this process with each company and characteristic until they are all ranked. If any rankings are unclear or more information is needed, then go back and ask! If you are still in the interview process, use this list to determine what questions to ask the hiring manager, recruiter, or interviewer in the next conversation. Even if the offer was already extended, it does not hurt anyone to ask for another conversation. If anything, this will show the company you are serious and they might want you even more (be sure to respect any deadlines they may have though).
How did JC rank her companies?
In JC’s case, she is considering her current company Dunder Mifflin as well as two other offers from Flavor Magazine (fictional business run by Khadijah James in Living Single) and Mystery Inc. (from Scooby-Doo).
My flawless taste in shows aside, let’s take the first characteristic, PTO, as an example. At Dunder Mifflin, JC gets 5 vacation days plus 5 sick days and only 4 holidays. If she were to take the role with Mystery Inc., JC will be working for herself and can take as much time as she would like but any hours not working she will not get paid. JC could make up for it with longer work days later though. Flavor Magazine, however, offers unlimited PTO! As a result, Flavor Magazine gets a 3 (most points because it is ranked first), Mystery Inc. gets a 2, and Dunder Mifflin gets a 1.
Step 5: Make a stress free decision
Now that all of the sheet is filled in, we can do some quick math (or even better have Excel do it for us). We will need to multiply each company rank against the weight of each characteristic and add this up for each company. In my personal experience, whatever company with the most points is likely the one I might’ve been leaning towards but going through this process helped me discount the other “what ifs” and hesitations I might have in mind. With JC, our example engineer, PTO has a weight of 4 and Flavor Magazine has a rank of 3, it will get 12 points. Mystery Inc and Dunder Mifflin will get 6 and 4 points respectively. Once this is added up, you will likely have a clear winner. In this case, Flavor Magazine. JC can now rest easy knowing that she is making the best decision for her career!
Step 6: Gut check
If for some reason you are not happy with the result of this framework and there was another company you were hoping would get the highest score, then one of two things happened. You knew what you wanted all along and did not need to go through this process OR something that you really looked forward to at the other company was not scoring as expected. You might have to tweak your weights or your characteristics until the scoring makes sense. This is what happened to me in my first iteration and why I decided to start weighing each characteristic.
I would also encourage everyone to take a period of time each year to re-evaluate their career, where they are, and where they would like to be. Even if you are content with your role, maybe your values or what you want in your career have changed in a year’s time. It is also likely you just need confirmation you are on the right track. Personally I try to do this on my anniversary every year at my company.
What now?
Well, go forth and conquer with your new found freedom and stress free life of course! Besides that, feel free to let me know if this process was helpful for you. And while you are at it I am also open to better names than “Career Framework”. You will get nothing but my gratitude though…
Thanks for reading!
