“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

Earlier this week, I wrote about the ​Career Roadmap ​– a visual map of critical inflection points along an emerging or developing career path. As I worked through the pieces of the Career Roadmap with a colleague, we uncovered another early challenge might arise for folks as they are mapping out their journey.

“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

Ah, the dreaded interview question. I hated that question in my earliest interviews!

How do you answer that question realistically if you’ve only thought about your current job and don’t have a sense of what the promotional path looks like, either at your specific organization or more generally? You might not even know what the options are – or what it takes to get there.

The Promotional Path is intended to be a starting point for this very conversation, not to provide an answer, but to provide a little fodder for discussion.

These are not titles, as you can tell, but more a mapping of responsibilities. Not every organization will have a path that maps this one exactly. Some differences you might see:

• If you work at a small organization, there might not be as many “stops” on the path. (Likewise, if you work at a huge one, there may be more!)
• Some organizations aren’t grounded in hierarchy – so advancement won’t come with explicit title changes. At the same time, there are few organizations who would say that there is no opportunity for advancement, so it might just look different.

Even if your industry doesn’t map onto these steps exactly, it is likely that there are elements of each step that apply. As you walk the path of your career, execution and delivery are the focus of the early phases. Then you might move to a broader or more complex scope, and/or add an element of strategy. You might, at some point, add on people management and be responsible for the execution and delivery of the people on your team. You might be responsible for a full department or component of the organization’s work – which typically combines strategy, execution, and leadership.

Here’s the most important piece of the puzzle – what do YOU want out of your career? This is not a tool that is supposed to dictate your path, it is intended to help you build context about what is possible, and to understand which steps build on one another.

If you have thought about how this path maps to your industry and your interests you can give an informed answer when someone asks where you see yourself in 5 years. You might say:

“I am really excited for this role and to execute on it well. I can see myself really killing it here as the experienced staff member who helps to onboard new staff.”

or

“In 5 years, I hope to be managing a team and taking on some of the strategic direction of this part of the organization.”

Even if no one asks you this question, it’s important to have an answer for yourself! If you have goals that involve taking on new challenges and responsibilities, you have to lay out a plan to get there. If you are the aspiring manager above and you don’t think about this at the outset, you might find yourself five years later floundering in the same role without having developed the skills and lined up the opportunities to get you where you want to go.

How does the tool map on to your industry? For those farther along in their careers, did you follow a path like this one?