Time for your year-end career review

It’s almost 2025, and the end of a calendar year is a great time for a career review. Sound complicated?  It doesn’t need to be. A career review is simply a chance to reflect on your career aspirations and your progress—and to set yourself up to make career goals for the coming year. Get started by moving through the three topics below.

Topic 1: This year’s accomplishments

Take some time to reflect on the past 12 months. You can get started by thinking about your strengths, and identifying goals they’ve helped you achieve. Your career strengths include a mix of personal assets and workplace achievements. Are you great at getting along with a range of people?  Are you uber-organized? Have in-demand technical skills?

With your strengths in mind, take a look at your calendar, notes, or old emails to revisit 2024. Once you’ve refreshed on your past year’s career activities, answer these questions:

• What were my biggest accomplishments?
• What am I most proud of?
• What did I get the most positive result or feedback from?

Topic 2: This year’s challenges

This is a chance to think about how you responded to any challenges you faced in 2024. When thinking about challenges, it’s helpful to identify both external and internal ones. External challenges may have to do with your industry or workplace. Do you work in an inherently challenging industry? Do you have colleagues who notoriously don’t get along? Unrealistic or unengaged leaders? Any of these external factors can impact your career success.

Internal challenges might be related to personal characteristics. We can’t all excel at everything, and everyone has areas of weakness—what are yours? Are there tasks that you find yourself commonly avoiding? Do you have trouble staying organized, or focused? Do you have trouble learning new systems or technologies? Listening to others’ ideas? Make a list and think about how your career progress might be impacted by these characteristics—and what you can do to overcome them.

As you reflect on challenges, remember that you most likely saw more growth as a result of challenges than as a result of your achievements. If you didn’t, this is a great time to think about how you might respond differently to future challenges.  Answer these questions:

• What were my biggest challenges?
• Did I end up growing from them or getting off track?
• What did I not accomplish that I wanted to?
• Do I need to reframe how I approach challenges?

Topic 3: Next year’s objectives

This topic will take you right into goal-setting for 2025. To set yourself up, think about these questions:

• What’s my dream for next year?
• What’s realistically possible for next year?
• What will I do the same as this year?
• What will I do differently?