Career Pathways
Helping steward your career path
Are you wondering about a new career path within our organization? Or simply trying to discern your next step? Are you looking for a way to serve that better aligns with your gifts, skills, and experience?
Career Pathways offers resources to help you explore potential directions for your development journey: understanding how God has shaped you and discovering your best fit in current and future roles.
Know
Discern
Plan
What is Career Path Planning?
Career development is looking to the future and making plans to grow and develop vocationally.
We will take three steps on the Career Path Planning journey:
- Know the desires God has placed in your heart and how He has created you.
- Discern your best contribution as you serve the Lord.
- Plan your growth and development for your current or future role.
Knowing these things will provide greater clarity when weighing ministry options and in finding your best contribution as you seek to be a good steward of all God has entrusted to you. It will also help you identify areas for development to move toward your desired career path. We’ve provided some resources to help you on this journey.
Let’s get started!
What does Career Path Planning mean to us?
The term Career Path Planning is borrowed from the corporate world – it is an established HR process. With our unique position as full-time Christian workers in a missionary organization, our understanding of Career Path Planning is a bit different than the corporate model. For us, Career Path Planning is a spiritual exercise of listening to God’s leading and walking in humble obedience. It is an exercise of discovering God’s plan, His will, and His specific direction for our lives.
With this in mind, Global LDHR has developed the article “Bringing Clarity to Calling,” which summarizes our perspective on God’s call and how it applies to us, both as an organization and individually.
Action Steps:
- Read: Bringing Clarity to Calling
- Reflect on these questions:
- How have you experienced God’s leading (or special calling) in your life?
- What are the elements that you feel have been most instrumental in God shaping you and leading in your present and future calling?
How do we get started?
Career Path Planning uses the Career Pathway Map, a tool designed to help a person know their God-given design and desires, discern their best contribution, and plan for their growth and development to achieve greater fruitfulness in both current and future roles.
Activate Your Journey:
- Open the Career Pathway Map, and make a copy so you can fill out the map as you walk through the next three steps. If you would like some help in filling out the map, check out the tips and videos below.
Step 1: Know tips
- Consider using spiritual gift inventories and personality assessments to provide objective information for this section (This document offers suggestions).
- Get feedback from others who know you well regarding their understanding of your gifts, strengths, and passions. This Peer Feedback Sheet will help you get the feedback you need.
- Watch the video below for help in filling out the Know step.
Step 2: Discern tips
- Watch the next video for help in filling out the Discern step.
Step 3: Plan tips
- Prayerfully design two or three action steps, either for your current role or to prepare you for a possible future role. Add them to your Personal Development Plan, or work with your team leader to develop a Key Developmental Assignment (KDA).
- Ask a coach to help you ensure your action steps are measurable, observable, and achievable, and to encourage you through to their successful completion.
- Watch the following video for help in filling out the Plan step:
Congratulations! You are taking exciting steps on your career path journey.
If this has been helpful to you, maybe you’d like to assist others on their journey. Please click on the Share tab to learn more.
How can we build a culture of seeking God’s will?
One goal of a national LDHR ministry is to cultivate an environment where people can give their best contribution to the movement – where everyone is following God’s leading, utilizing their God-given gifts, and serving in a place where they can thrive and be fruitful. Career Path Planning is one way we can help make that a reality. Here are some ways we can share this helpful process with others:
–Encourage a culture of seeking God and His leading
Every member of our movement could benefit from periodically setting aside time to draw near to God and seek His continued guidance. It will likely feel like a smoother and easier experience each time you return to the Career Path Planning steps. Using Career Path Planning provides a meaningful framework for cultivating a culture in which individuals are encouraged to discern their best contribution and help others do the same. In this culture, leaders at every level also hold in balance organizational goals and personal development to accelerate the fulfillment of our God-given mission.
–A leader’s role
If you’ve led for any length of time, you’ve experienced a team member deciding to move on—often after already concluding there’s no future for them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. People long to be known, needed, and to have a future, and Career Path Planning creates space to discern God’s leading—whether that’s within or beyond the organization—so we can bless and send them well. This is a shared responsibility: individuals pursue being known, needed, and having a future; team leaders actively cultivate it; and organizational and LDHR leaders shape an environment where it becomes a consistent reality for all.
–Ongoing leadership and development conversations
Career Path Planning is an individual process primarily concerned with the individual’s growth and development. It works best when used in conjunction with our organizational processes (primarily concerned with the growth and development of the movement). Both are crucial if we are to fulfill the mission God has given us!
This blog post, Ongoing Career and Leadership Conversations, will help you gain a deeper picture of how these two work together.
–Helping others with the process
One desired outcome of these Career Path Planning pages is that we will be able to use them to help others understand how to pursue God’s leading in their lives. Many of our members are either unaware of the tool or lack the time needed to seek God’s leading. This is where God can use you to come alongside them and coach them through the process.
Possible Action Step
- Think through who might be in a season of discernment and share Career Path Planning with them!
All your tools in one place!
Click the links below to access or download the key tools for Career Pathway Planning.
- Career Pathway Map – the main resource for charting your course
- Peer Feedback Sheet – for obtaining input from others
- SMART Goals – how to set goals that work
- Bringing Clarity to Calling – an article outlining issues surrounding that often-mysterious issue of “God’s calling”
- Tips for Discovering your God-given Gifts and Personality – a document with free spiritual gift inventories and suggested personality assessments (including some free ones)
- Career Pathways Overview – a one-page summary of the process
- Five Es for Development (5 Es) – an article describing five key elements for development
- Career Path Planning Podcast #22 – listen in to how the CPP helps us listen to God and discover His calling.
The demonstration videos
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