Where do you want to be in Five Years?

You are going to be asked this question and it can be annoyingly hard to answer. And it is not wise to say that you don’t have a plan, even if that is the truth. You will not impress the hiring manager with your honesty and lack of a thoughtful plan.

There is a methodology espoused by The Five O’Clock Club called The Fifteen Year or Forty Year Vision. This is a brainstorming exercise where you envision yourself in the future. For the sake of argument, let’s say you are 55 years old today and will be 70 in 15 years. Your vision may take into consideration that your children will have completed college. All the sacrifices that you made to provide for your family are no longer necessary. You are free to choose for yourself what you want to do with your remaining work years. You may contemplate moving from your family home and starting over again in an entirely different community.

The challenge the typical mature worker faces is much like a recent college graduate faces. Now that you are free to set your own direction, what path do you follow?

Many of us have careers that developed based on serendipity, one thing led to another. We got a call from a friend that thought we might be interested in a position that they knew about. In other words, we have no plan, life unfolds in front of us. We take one step at a time, sometime with good results, sometimes not so good results.

This “old school” career development is simply not sophisticated enough for the age in which we live. The change of pace is accelerating and will continue accelerate.

Corporate investing in developing an employee’s careers has all but ceased. Today employers find the talent they need on the open market. R& D spending has shifted to investing in start ups.

That is good for experienced folks, because small companies, start ups in particular, need the experience and knowledge. And these start ups can be located in some fairly nice places, many times associated with educational institutions. The strategy that will form the basis of your 15 Year Vision would be to leverage your technical skills, industry knowledge and business network to provide a service to the start up that they cannot get from a less experienced employee. It is a fact that small companies create most of the new jobs in this country. It really doesn't make sense to try to work at a large corporation where they will not value your experience and skill.

Another option might be to open your own consulting business or leveraging your experience in another way. Peter T was the general manager for an industrial laundry located in Silicon Valley. As more and more semiconductor facilities were shifted overseas in the great outsourcing migration, there was less and less need for clean room services and Peter’s operation was suffering. Peter is an expert in clean room supplies, so he thought about investigating supplying clean room supplies to the small number of remaining customers by importing products from overseas. Peter had the connections to the suppliers and the buyers, so he started his own home-based business which grossed $3.8M last year.

Peter has expanded beyond clean room supplies as that market has continued to shrink, by expanding into biodegradable packing for food products – and he expects to gross over $6M this year.

Peter T is 66 years old and his 15 year vision is to work at his own business for the next 5 years and selling his business or transferring the business to his daughter for the final years when he will be a part-time employee.

This constructive use of our imagination to envision a future that is attractive to us is a healthy exercise. You have to start by disassociating from your current life condition and 15 years out will take you out far enough. Once you have envisioned or fantasized about this life 15 years from now, you can back up 5 years at a time, so that you have a 10 year vision and a 5 year vision. If you take this exercise seriously, the end result will be a plan that gives you a thoughtful plan for the future. It may not be 100% accurate, but you can always make changes to a plan when you have one. More importantly you will be able to answer the question, “Where do your want to be in 5 years” with a very credible response.