Careers are hardly ever linear, or easy to predict — but what if you had a map that could lead you to your dream job sooner?
Years before she became the president and CEO of Essence Ventures LLC, one of the largest Black media companies in the world, Caroline Wanga asked herself the same question.
In 2005, she had just started her first full-time corporate job as an operations manager at Target in Tyler, Texas, and, like most 20-somethings, felt lost in her career.
"At that point, I decided Target was cool, but I had no idea what the hell I was doing there," says Wanga, now 45. "I thought, 'I should probably figure out what I want to do.'"
One of her managers at the time, Mark Irvin, recommended she try four different experiences that are typical of working at a retail company like Target to better inform what kind of job she wanted down the line:
- Lead a group of hourly employees
- Have an individual contributor role with no direct reports
- Work in the human resources department
- Lead a group of salaried employees
So, she sat at her desk and sketched out four boxes, all connected by arrows and pointing to a question mark that represented the career enlightenment she had been seeking.
It's a simple exercise that Wanga says helped her figure out exactly what she wanted to do with her life.
Wanga has since drawn two more maps to guide her career: first, to become Target's chief culture, diversity and inclusion officer, and second, to plan her next move after leaving Target in 2020, which led to her joining Essence.
Here are Wanga's best tips for mapping out your dream career:
Be vocal about what you want
After drawing her career map, Wanga printed out two copies: one for her boss, and one for her human resources manager.
She set up meetings with both of them to explain her goals, and discuss how they could best support her at each stage.
Communicating your goals to your manager is "far more important" than just mapping them out, Wanga adds. "You need to be vocal about what you want," she says. "Setting clear expectations helps you be on the same page with your boss and actually commit to achieving whatever it is you set out to do."
It also helps your boss be a better advocate for you. "All of my managers said they were relieved that they had been given clear instructions for how to help me," says Wanga. "Managers are asked to help people develop their careers all the time, but they rarely get sufficient guidance from the person directly to be effective."
Have a clear destination, but be flexible on the route
On her map, Wanga wrote out three specific results she wanted to get out of each experience, whether it was developing a new skillset or learning about different business processes.
"The reason that was so important was so I knew that once I could check those three things off my list, I was done and could move on, or decide if it was the kind of job I wanted to re-visit," she says.
There was one important experience Wanga didn't plan to have, but would change the course of her career: leading Target's Black employee resource group.
In that role, she worked with Target's chief diversity and inclusion officer, a position she jokes is the "closest you get to a soul in corporate America."
So, she drew another map, this time with "chief diversity and inclusion officer" at the top.
Wanga planned on attaining that goal in 2018, but she rose through the ranks faster than anticipated and was offered the job in 2014.
After five years in Target's C-suite, Wanga felt stalled. "Movement is slower when you're at the upper tiers of a corporation," she says.
During a business trip, Wanga doodled the start of a third map on the back of a notepad. She decided she was ready for a new project, one that would allow her to champion "fearlessness and authenticity," but wasn't sure what that would be.
Then, in June 2020, she was offered a job as Essence's new chief growth officer. Wanga accepted, seeing it as an opportunity to help build more "purposeful approaches to serving communities of color."
Within a month, she was promoted to interim chief executive officer at Essence, taking on the CEO title full-time in February 2021.
"You don't have to have all the answers, the path can be different," Wanga previously told CNBC. "If I had waited to define the job I wanted and waited for the perfect job, I'd still be an intern."
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