Journey Line — career tool [15 minutes]
Useful themes & insights
A journey line exercise is a useful way to capture key moments and insights from your life and/or work and can help you to:
- Identify your motivations, skills, experience, strengths and values.
- Summarise your background and journey.
Your journey line belongs to you
You can make it high level or detailed. If you choose to share it with others, you don’t need to include anything you don’t want to.
Get started
Prepare by getting a piece of blank paper. Draw a line from left to right across the centre of the page. Draw another line from top to bottom and label with a happy face above and a sad face below.
Your can start the exercise from the beginning of your career or look at only a part of your career, or start from right back when you were born.
People have said after doing their own journey line exercise it’s been very helpful to repeat it for their family and ancestor journey to see the parts of their history that influences their work and career motivations.
Creating a journey line
1. Think of key moments from your work and personal life.
Draw a wavy line to represent the ups and downs and make notes of the big and small moments that stand out to you.
2. Reflect on your journey line.
✨ What made those particular moments memorable? ✨
What you drew is unique to your story so what parts are stand out to you?
- Were these moments about other people or yourself, growth or stagnating, surprise or choice, the type of work? Something else?
- Positive moments often align with what you value and what you want more of.
- Negative moments will have given you learning and insight about what you don’t want again, or want to change in your current situation.
✨ What themes are there about your motivations and values? ✨ Remember that our life circumstances and needs can affect our motivation and values.
- Motivations can be pragmatic (e.g. to earn enough or work in a certain location) or they can be what you want more of (such as growth, challenge or being able to do what you know you’re capable of). Motivations may also be what you want less of.
- Can you identify what makes you feel energised or depleted?
✨ Which changes were due to external forces and which were your own choices? ✨
- Change from external forces means you have experience being able to adapt or start from scratch.
- Change from choice means you have initiative and motivation.
3. Use the information
Your insights are useful for self-awareness. You can use them to help you figure out your next career moves, or to summarise your journey for a CV/cover letter or interview.
- Write a few sentences about your career journey so far.
- Identify key stories about your career, for example, projects or teams you really enjoyed and why.
- Find the themes for your main personal and technical skills.
- Reflect on your values in the past and now.
- Decide what you want next. For example, what role, team, customers or product do you want, and specific logistics or dealbreakers needed.
- Decide if there are steps you want to take based on your insights.
That’s it. A simple exercise to find themes and insights from the past that help you in the future.
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This exercise is inspired by Lyssa Adkins’ book “Coaching Agile Teams”
