By Lisa Taylor

In revolutionary times, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll no longer get what you’ve gotten in the past. This is true whether you’re an individual navigating your own career path or you’re leading an organization through massive disruption.

So, when revolution is brewing and the rules of work are changing all around you, how do you adapt?

Something else actually has to happen before you can adapt. First, you have to decide if you even need to adapt to changing conditions and new rules. To do this, you have to know what your career needs, passion, talent, and impact are. Unfortunately, knowing isn’t always easy. You may need new resources to help.

It often feels like there are hard rules for how careers work, with clear “dos” and “don’ts.” Sometimes, these rules deal with time: how long it should take to find a job, how long you should stay in a job before moving, how long you should wait for a promotion, pay raise, or to take your next training program. These “shoulds,” which are usually presented as best practices, are often based on individual opinions rather than objective career development and labour market research.

The truth is that despite all the changes taking place in the world of work, the fundamentals of how we align our identities, work, life, and learning have remained the same. Of course, this doesn’t mean that adapting to changing conditions, new rules, or rules that no longer serve us has gotten any easier.

If you don’t have the right resources, it can be extremely difficult to recognize when a work- or career-related shift is worthwhile to make, and when it’s simply a passing trend or noise. The ability to recognize the difference between the two is a skill. This is good news! Skills can be learned—and this skill is especially powerful when grounded in specific, proven career development methods.

In the rest of this article, I give you instructions for an activity that will help you take an honest account of what’s actually changing (or has already changed) for you, and what you might want to do about it. If you lead an organization, I also show you how to modify this activity for strategic planning and organizational results.

Remember, to adapt to the changing world of work, first you have to recognize and define what’s shifting in your own career, and if you need to adapt as a result. From there, you can identify hypotheses that you want to test in order to bring your career back into alignment—what we call your “SweetSpot.” When you focus on your SweetSpot, you cultivate the ability to recognize the difference between a passing trend and a shift that is worthwhile to make in your career.

Discover your Career SweetSpot

To use the interactive version of this activity, click here.

Step 1: Build your lists.

For each of the four questions below, create a separate list of as many responses to them as you can. You may need to ask others to help you, especially when identifying unique skills or what you care about and value the most.

1. What do you want and need from your work?
2. What skills or talents do you have that others admire and wish they could emulate?
3. What matters to you?
4. What impact do you want your work to have (or what problem do you want to be part of solving)?

Step 2: Find the patterns.

When you’ve finished building your four lists, look for the patterns in and across them. What common themes, trends, or ideas seem to keep emerging? Here are examples of common themes you might see across your lists:

• Fostering safety
• Building something new
• Engaging with diverse groups
• Teaching and learning all at the same time
• Creating beauty in practical ways
• Meeting lifestyle and practical needs

Write down your themes. They are your “SweetSpot,” the core criteria that you need to have satisfied as you adapt to changing environments, opportunities, and workplace conditions.

Step 3: Test your SweetSpot.

You now have a set of key themes, needs, or criteria that must be satisfied in your career. As a way to test your SweetSpot, think about your current role, job title, and work. In relation to that work, rank each of your SweetSpot criteria on a scale from 1-10, where 1 means your work does not address that criterion at all and 10 means your work addresses it in a very consistent and satisfying way.

Take a look at where your work scores high and where it scores low. Set a hypothesis about criteria where you scored low. What might be possible to change within your work to increase the score?

Step 4: Experiment.

Using the hypotheses that you identified in Step 3, set up an experiment that tests how you might make a change that increases your score, or brings your work into better alignment with your SweetSpot. An example of an experiment might be to notice where your work scores low on SweetSpot criteria, and then have a conversation with a colleague who knows your work well to explore how you might “nudge” your score by making changes. Test your assumptions about how your manager might react to a similar conversation. Be open to any unexpected and unintended consequences and opportunities that emerge.

Step 5: Take action.

Using the results of your experiment, decide what actions you can take within three time horizons to bring your career in line with your SweetSpot:

1. Immediately
2. In the short-term (decide what timeframe this means for you)
3. In the long-term (decide what timeframe this means for you)

Set “new rules” to govern your own work, without concern for rules that others are setting for themselves.