Individual Career Plan

Introduction

Having a clear career roadmap helps you reflect on your strengths, identify areas for growth, and align your current role with long-term ambitions. This post provides a practical Individual Career Plan template you can use to guide self-assessment, prioritize your professional development, and set meaningful goals that align with your vision for the future. It encourages open conversations not only with peers and mentors but also with managers, who can use this same framework to support their reports in a structured, constructive way. By outlining clear objectives and action steps, you create a framework for continuous improvement and more informed career decisions. The process not only clarifies your own path forward, but also helps managers understand how best to provide guidance, allocate resources, and help their teams develop. Ultimately, this approach gives everyone involved the clarity, direction, and confidence needed to chart a path toward achieving individual and collective professional objectives. The Google Docs version is here.

Individual Career Plan template

0. Introduction

Start by filling this out by yourself, for yourself.

Then, discuss it with your manager, in peer-coaching, or anybody whose opinion you trust and put weight on. The discussion part is important! For example, it's possible that you put down "I'm a great communicator" under your strengths, but then others will not agree. This is a great learning opportunity!

Fundamentally, this process should start by introspection, and end with some degree of clarity of where you want to go at <company> (and beyond), and a plan to achieve it. Note that depending on your ambition, your manager will not be able to give you all answers — eg. if your plan is to become the CTO of <company>, then you'll have to figure out most of it by yourself!

1. Industry future

• Where is your industry — however you define it — going in the next 3-5-10 years?
  • What are the views or bets that you believe in specifically, that most others don't?
    • Eg. "I believe there will be no people managers in the future, this will be automated away by LLMs."
• What does this mean for you?

2. Self assessment

• Identify existing skills, strengths and values and how they contribute to your role.
  • both technical and non-technical
• Should be a long list..

3. Current role

• What is my current job, today?
• What are the types of accomplishments I'm most proud of?
• Reflect on job responsibilities and how well the skills and strengths above are utilized.
• What are my skills and strengths that are not utilized?
  • How can we change the situation so they are?

4. Self improvement

• Identify key areas for improvement to become more effective in your current role
• Eg. "I want to learn Rust."
• Eg. "I want to be able to communicate in a clear and concise manner."
• Eg. "I want to become better at planning for a small team."
• What resources can you utilise to develop your skills?
• What do you want to achieve short-term?
• What do you want to achieve long-term?

5. Goals at <company>

• How long do I want to stay at <company>?
  • Eg. a median tenure of 3-4 years, or longer?
  • What does it depend on, per current visibility?
• What do I want to achieve in my time at <company>?
  • (start by looking at the points in the Self improvement section)
  • Eg. "I want to learn Kubernetes during my time at <company>."
  • Eg. "I want to work at 3 or more BUs for the exposure."
  • Eg. "Be the first person to put an LLM into production at <company>."
  • Eg. "I'm a DS but I want to pivot to become a DE."
  • Eg. "Reach X USD/mo salary."
  • Eg. "Reach level Ln."
  • Eg. "I want to manage N other people."

6. How to achieve my <company> goals

• Do my current OKRs reflect what I want to achieve at <company>?
• What needs to happen for me to achieve my goals at <company>?
  • Work on this with your manager(s)
• How will I get the visibility I need, if I need it?
• How compatible are my goals with how promotions work at <company> (assuming some of the goals are about promotions)?
• Are there any challenges or obstacles preventing me from achieving my goals at <company>?
• Can other people (within and outside <company>) help me achieve my goals? How?
• What do you want to achieve/reach in 2024?
• What do you want to achieve/reach in 2025-2026?
• What do you want to achieve/reach by 2030?
  • Consider setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals.

7. Career goals

• Thinking long-term and more broadly, beyond your time at <company>, what are your career goals?
  • Eg. "I want to start my own company in the X space."
  • Eg. "I want to stay at <company> long-term."
  • Eg. "I want to pivot to the finance industry and become a quant."
  • Eg. "I want to go to Saudi and become Minister of AI."
• You can consider different scenarios, for example how can your career goals change depending on the development of AI in the upcoming years?
• What do you want to achieve/reach in 2025?
• What do you want to achieve/reach by 2030?

8. How to achieve career goals

• Are my current OKRs and responsibilities aligned with my future career goals?
• Is there a way to measure success and track progress?
• Does my plan fit with my work-life balance and overall personal well-being?
• What needs to happen at <company> for me to achieve my career goals?
  • Work on this with your manager

Marton's Individual Career Plan

As a reference how I fill this out, I will share the full text of my self assessment below.

2. Self assessment

I am a classic generalist — I have not really specialized in any domain. This is true at many levels, eg. programming languages (C++, Python, Javascript), technical domain (software engineer, data engineer, data scientist) and even management vs individual contributor. I try to be reasonably competent in multiple areas, at the cost of not being the best at any. In my opinion, there is no right or wrong choice on this spectrum.

Having said that, specific skills where I'm reasonably good (although, in almost all of these, there are professionals who are much experienced than me):

• Technical:
  • experience in multiple programming languages
    • C/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, SQL, Haskell, Prolog, C#, etc
  • experience developing for multiple operating systems
    • Windows, Linux, BSD, Darwin
  • good understanding of basic computer concepts, operating systems, networking
    • have written production-grade systems code
  • strong baseline UNIX/Linux skills, competent at bash
  • lots of experience debugging software bugs in the above environments
  • strong understanding of distributed systems concepts
    • have written distributed database in C++
  • have written production-grade implementations of many algorithms
    • eg. linked lists, hashmaps, binary trees, Paxos consensus algorithm, etc
  • have used git for 10+ years
  • good understanding of theoretical topics of computer science
    • eg. data structures, algorithms, complexity classes and results
  • good understanding of probability theory, statistics, calculus, etc.
  • good understanding of core concepts and challenges of Data Engineering
  • good understanding of core metrics and models used in Data Science work
  • good understanding of experimentation / AB testing
  • good understanding of how a neural network works (from training to inference), including LLMs
• Soft technical:
  • have done lots of tech interviews for SWE, DE, DS, PM roles across many countries and companies
  • have done lots of code reviews
  • can define architectures (software or data) and write good documentation
  • have written ~200 blog posts on Bytepawn, most of them on technical topics
• Non-technical:
  • clear and concise communication, verbal or written
  • reasonably (but not exceptionally) good judge of character, useful for hiring
  • I have hired people and teams across 5 companies, across 3 countries
  • have done 100s of interviews
  • I have a fair amount of people management experience
    • our current org of ~40 people is the largest I've managed
  • have built many teams and cultures from scratch, in many countries and companies
  • good at making plans for people and teams
• Meta:
  • constant desire to learn, I buy ~3-5 books/mo from Amazon on all sorts of topic
  • my apartment is "littered" with books waiting to be read
  • as I now have a family, I'm unfortunately less open to take chances that drastically affect my income (ie. zeroing it out), but I'm still open to it
    • I routinely re-evaluate my risk-reward profile, what's a good path ahead

Conclusion

By using this Individual Career Plan template you gain a structured way to assess your current strengths and areas for development, and build a roadmap for the future. Whether you’re defining your own goals or guiding team members toward theirs, the steps outlined here encourage open dialogue, informed decisions, and continuous learning. Investing in your growth sets yourself and those around you on a path toward a more successful career journey.