The Career Life-Line Activity: A Reflective Career Development Tool

Career Life-lines

Career life-lines are a very simple yet helpful tool for reflecting on what matters at work.

A their core, the activity involves drawing a line tracking your experience of your career, over the time you’ve spent in your career. This can also include your education, depending where you are in your career.

To set up a career life-line, get a large piece of paper and draw two axis. The vertical will measure the quality of your experience in your career (or another rough measure like happiness, engagement, fulfilment, etc), and the horizontal access will represent the time (typically years) that you’ve spent working / in education in your career.

Completing the activity involves several stages:

Step 1

Spend a few moments telling yourself your story of your career and education so far. As you do so, reflect on your experiences to date.

• What were the key blocks of time that you’ve spent on different things?
• How did you feel in the different chapters of this narrative of your history?
• How happy / satisfied / fulfilled / engaged did you feel along your journey?

Step 2

Once you’ve spent time reflecting, draw a line of your experiences on a piece of paper against the two axis we shared earlier. We do think traditional pen and paper are best for this. There’s something nice about the physical and analogue nature of drawing this way.

Step 3

Now that you’ve drawn your career life-line, it’s time to reflect again.

This time spend some time diving into the highs and lows on your line:

• What made the highs high and the lows low?
• What were you getting at the high points?
• What were you missing at the low points?
• What tasks, activities or topics were you engaged in?
• Who were you working with and what were your working relationships like?
• What wider purpose were you working towards?
• How mature were you in relation to the topics?
• And so on…

Once you’ve finished reflecting on these highs and lows, draft some notes on your career life-line setting out the key points that contributed to your experiences.

Step 4

By this stage you’ll have done some great reflection and backward looking consideration of your career and education to date. The lens through which you’ll have done this is basically the category you chose for your vertical axis. Whatever that ended up being, you’ll now have a pretty clear understanding of the different aspects of a role, job or context that contribute to you having a better or worse experience.

Now that you’ve done initial reflections, we think it’s very helpful to have a coaching style conversation with a coach, peer or line manager. The purpose of this conversation is to help you gain further insight and clarity into what you need from a role or task to have a good experience, and the things that contribute to you having a poor experience that you’d like to avoid. Questions like the following can help with these conversations:

• What do you need from a role to feel fulfilled in it?
• What consistencies do you notice across the highs of your career?
• What skills and strengths are you using at the high points?
• What group dynamics help you have a good experience at work?
• What consistencies do you notice across your low points?
• Which of your needs are not being met at your low points?
• And so on…

Step 5

The last stage in this process is the “so-what” stage, it’s the move to action.

Having gained insights on what helps you have a better experience at work, it’s now time to start to explore how you can change your career or role so that it is more fulfilling.

To do this, we actually recommend adopting a job-crafting approach, which you can learn more about via the links below.

To help learn more about what you need from a role to be happy, it’s worth exploring career drivers and anchors as well as the Ikigai model.

It’s probably also worth learning a bit more about strengths (we recommend Values in Actions Strengths) as well as reading up on purpose. Of course, self-awareness is a key part of this too, as is developing an understanding of your personal values.

The PERMA model can help further, as can learning about subjective wellbeing, hedonic adaptation and miswanting too. On that vein, Laurie Santos’ free, online wellbeing course is also great and worth checking out.

We’ve yet to write about job crafting ourselves, but our friends at Tailored Thinking do a lot of this, and we recommend their resources. You can listen to our podcast on job crafting with Rob Baker from Tailored Thinking below:

This activity is an excellent, intuitive and helpful reflective tool as well as a great conversation starter. It works well as in workshops, 1:1s, coaching or any other developmental setting. 

As with many activities like this, the process of using your hands to draw helps people to reflect in a way that listing and similar activities do not. The single line linking the entirety of someone’s career also helps them think in that larger, sweeping, connected framing that helps them explore key points in their narrative.

While the initial part of this activity is clearly an individual and reflective activity, it leads very well into discussion and reflection.

Of course, this is also a bit of a naval gazing activity, so it’s the type of thing that people can get really into, which is great. The risk of things like this, though, is that it’s sometimes hard to remember on the “why” or “so-what” of it. What’s the outcome we’re trying to achieve with this reflection? What will be different afterwards?

So our only real words or caution are that as someone using this tool, it’s important to be clear on why it’s being used, and to try and keep those objectives in line and move the reflection and conversations forward in a way that is helpful for participants.

We’ve just picked this activity up through our work as facilitators and coaches, but this book is also helpful: Brown, S. D., & Lent, R. W. (Eds.). (2013). Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

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