Getting where you want to go by PRE-WRITING your resume

Writing your current resume isn’t the most fun thing possible, and most people have challenges writing their current resume.  So asking someone to PRE-WRITE their resume is at a different level of effort / absurdity.  But if you think about how much value that would provide, then you might decide it is worth the effort.  Think about it for a minute.  To pre-write your resume, you’ll have to think about what do you want to do/accomplish in the next X years.  You can pre-write your resume for however many years/roles you want in the future, but it is a useful tool to plan to achieve your career goals.

From your latest role, think through:

• Where could this role take me?
  • what sort of opportunities do I have to add as an accomplishment on my future resume?
• What about other roles in the company?
  • The people you know that are in the other group where you heard they are hiring, what opportunities could they offer and do they fit better with your ultimate career goals?
• What about other companies?
  • The clients, colleagues, friends and family where you were interested in what they are doing, how do they fit?
• Which one is the better fit to get you closer to your ultimate goal?
  • Or is any one of them a welcome diversion that you would be willing to have even though that would mean your ultimate goal would wait?
• After this future role, how long would you stay there and how much closer would you be to that ultimate goal?
  • How many more companies / roles would you need?

Now that you have a sense of all of the steps that you could take to get to your ultimate goal, you can think through the next step of: what could you do to make those opportunities a reality?  To get that next role:

• Do you have all of the skills and expertise?
  • Do you need to learn something new or work on existing skills?
• What about the next role, and the next?

You’ll start building a little plan on how to get to your ultimate goal, which is a great thing since now you can be excited about putting those plans into action and achieving your goals.  Or if you had the opposite view and freaked yourself out as to all the work that is needed, then you can now look for the help that you need to get there.  If you are early in your career, that does not mean you have to write the next 40 years of work, you can just limit to the next 1-2 jobs or however far in the future that you believe you have direction.

At the end of the day, pre-writing your resume is not as absurd as it sounds and might just what you need to give yourself some direction.  The fun part comes when you realize that you have so many potential pivot points and options to get to your destination.    And the bright side is that if all goes according to plan, you won’t have any challenges writing your current resume since you pre-wrote it.

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