MAKING A CAREER PATH MAP by Janet Vaughan

I know this sounds like a really strange one - the sort of thing consultants ask you to do on away days - and you've only come to this page out of idle curiosity rather than because you're actually interested in making a career map, but I once had to make a career map for a grant application and I found it a really illuminating experience... So what exactly IS a career path map? Basically it's a flow diagram of your (professional) life. A bit like a family tree or a website map, it marks the important projects or events in your career to date, and the key factors that influenced the decisions you made and the directions you took. I put "professional" in brackets in the previous sentence because personal factors obviously have a big influence on the map, but the main focus is your professional development. What's so useful about it? It's probably the single most useful bit of reflective professional development you can do on your own without getting embroiled in a training programme. Because an artist's career very rarely progresses in a logical way and it is the sort of career which can be more like a lifestyle decision than a job, it is often really tricky to take time out to reflect on your practice. Although "reflecting on your practice" sounds a bit self-indulgent, I think it can be really useful: - to understand how you have got to the point you are at and what has influenced you along the way; - to understand what has caused you to take one direction over another; - to make yourself conscious of your strengths as an artist; - to focus/confirm what your ambitions are and to help you move towards realising them. How do you go about making a career map, then? You can go back as far as you want (depending how long you've been practising and how big your piece of paper is) but a good start might be what made you choose to be an artist and if you studied at University, what made you choose the course you did. Basically think of the key moments throughout your career to date and map them in a chronological timeline. Once you start, you'll start to see patterns emerging - some links/themes will always have been clear, but others will (probably) be quite unexpected but (hopefully) useful in getting a more thorough understanding of how and why you do the work you do/have followed the path you have. It's clearer if you add lines in to indicate particular links, themes or patterns. As well as things you are happy about, this will (probably) also turn up things you might be less happy about and might want to do something about - for example it might not be until you take time to reflect that you really realise that you have actually been doing a disproportionate amount of workshops or teaching and not spending enough time making your own work. So how does this help with the future? The map of the past should help you identify the priorities to put into a map of the future. You'll have identified gaps in your practice, things you want to pursue or spend more time on, strands which you are less keen on doing more of and some ambitions for future work. This will give you some targets to set yourself for the next couple of years and should help you move forwards in a more focused way, helping you to pursue opportunities you want to develop and turn down work which will be less interesting or useful. In other words; it will make you cut out the dead wood, or at least help you to recognise the pragmatic (financial) reasons why you are retaining some dead wood...