career growth

9 Steps to Your Dream Career

9 Steps to Your Dream Career

In this chapter, I’m going to put together a complete framework for you to start thinking about your career aka your career plan.

But I’d like to take you through a slight detour first.

Imagine for a moment that you an organization. The main goal of an organization is to make a profit. To make a profit and grow your business, you would probably want to put together a strategy in place. This strategy would include defining your vision as a company, defining your mission as a company, your values, understanding the market and customers that you want to go after, understanding the environment that you operate it, understanding your competition and much more.

You, like other companies would do something known as the “Strategic Planning” process, where they answer 3 high level questions:

  1. Where are you now as a company?
  2. Where do you want to be?
  3. How will you get there?

5 Steps to Plan and Execute on Your Career

5 Steps to Plan and Execute on Your Career

Most students and professionals don’t think of their careers in terms of a blueprint. Instead they equate careers to “having a good job”. Yes, your job is part of your career, but it not the only part of your career. Instead, I’d like to present in this chapter an alternative definition of thinking about your career. I’d like to present to you “ACCELERATE – The 5 x 3 Dream Career Blueprint” that consists of five core steps and three acceleration steps. In this chapter, we will cover the five core steps and then in chapter 2 we will discuss how to accelerate your results three times using three acceleration steps.

The five core steps are all jotting down your long-term goals and putting a plan in place to achieve them. It is also about smaller plans to execute and achieve your long-term goals. But just applying the five core steps are not enough. To truly accelerate your career, there are three additional steps that need to be applied consistently. Applying these three steps consistently through the process will ensure that you see absolute acceleration of your results. 

Putting Together a Blueprint For Your Career

Putting Together a Blueprint For Your Career

Most professionals don’t think of their careers in terms of a blueprint. Instead they equate careers to “having a good job”. Instead, I’d like to present in this chapter an alternative definition of thinking about your career. These are the same techniques that I have used to take my career from an entry level employee to Chief Operating Officer of a private software company and now to the CEO and Founder of my own company. These are the same techniques that high 6 and 7 figure executives use when defining and executing their own careers. These are the same techniques that I’ve used when building teams across every functional area during my 12-year executive career. This chapter will go through the blueprint in detail.

How to Research a Company Before a Job Interview?

How to Research a Company Before a Job Interview?

In this video, I will discuss a 9 step framework that you can use to research a company before your upcoming interviews. Specifically, I recommend researching the following:

  1. Understanding the company's products/services and business model. 
  2. Understanding the company's vision and mission. 
  3. Understanding the company's culture and values. 
  4. Understanding the company's customers. 
  5. Understanding their competitors. 
  6. Understanding the company's metrics. 
  7. Understanding it's management team. 
  8. Understanding its future plans. 
  9. News or rumors about the company.