The Mid-Year Career Audit: How to Evaluate Your Professional Trajectory

Power of Reflection

Many professionals only reflect on their careers during specific times, most notably at performance reviews. While those are good times to take time to reflect on the previous year, reviews also carry additional weight and focus from supervisors. With many performance reviews occurring in December/January, this makes June an ideal time to do personal reflection. If your performance reviews occur in the summer time, flipping the calendar and revisiting this in December is ideal.

Reflecting on where you’ve been this year and what you’d still like to accomplish is valuable at a mid-way point through the year, but professionals should view this as a health check on their career. From that lens, this career health check can become an annual “winning move” that helps you audit your career equity.

4 Principles to Evaluate

For our mid-year career audit, we will dive into 4 principles we recommend evaluating. Taking time to reflect on each principle will allow you, as a professional, to gain a holistic understanding of your current career situation.

Impact Audit

When was the last time you updated, or even thought about, your resume? I’ve worked with professionals that had not updated their resume in years, which often leads to forgetting some of the wins they’ve had throughout the years (small & big accomplishments). If you actively review your goals or metrics during performance reviews, take some time to think about what you have accomplished in the time since that last review. What are some metrics and successes that you can claim? I encourage you to write down those wins - and celebrate them if you haven’t! Once you have these written out, where do you want or need to go from here? Mapping out the rest of your year, making pivots, and adjusting course can set you up for great professional growth.

Compensation Audit

Budgets for next financial year begin to be drafted and worked through between Q2 and Q3 for many employers. Your financial audit should begin now as well - position yourself BEFORE budgets are finalized and approved. Think about some of these questions: Is your salary keeping pace with industry expectations? Have you researched what your market value is? Are you being squeezed to fill two jobs instead of one? Have your contributions and successes exceeded goals, metrics, and expectations? Reflecting on and answering these questions can help you determine if a raise should be advocated for, and help you illustrate your argument for the raise. Doing a market analysis for yourself can also help determine your current value!

Fulfillment Audit

Fulfillment principles aren’t as easy to evaluate. They take deeper reflection, but are critically important. A lack of fulfillment can lead to professional burnout - sometimes this hits hard and fast, while other times it happens over the span of years. Some may call this a sanity audit, reflecting on the mental aspects of their professional life. Consider how you FEEL about the work you are doing. An important consideration for many professionals is are you still learning and growing, or just coasting through the motions. Take time to reflect on whether or not your current role still fits within your long-term professional trajectory or goals.

Network Audit

Relationships are the backbone of professional networks. Summer time is the perfect time to “heat up” those connections and relationships, especially if they’ve gone cold over time. Connect back with our previous blog for ways to network during the summer months if you need some inspiration. The network principle consists of two main pillars for a professional, the internal company network, and the external professional network. Spending time on both this summer will put you in the driver’s seat for your next move!

Next Steps

An audit without execution is potentially just an itemized list of frustrations. Whether your audit reveals it’s time to advocate for a promotion internally or quietly launch a confidential external pivot, you don't have to map out that playbook alone. If there are pieces of this puzzle that you’d like help with, schedule your Career Audit appointment today to review the 4 principles and design a carefully constructed, personalized plan for continued career growth!