Career Check-in Template

Goals

Note

Note: The aim of the "Goals" section is to a) get the mentee to think critically about what they want out of their working career, and b) give the mentor visibility into the mentee's ambitions, and to provide guidance and opportunities (where available). It's expected that the goal answers will change quite a lot over the first few check-ins. As the mentee develops a better understanding of what they want the longer-term goals should solidify. These prompts are just examples to start the conversation and is focused on engineering. Tweak this template for your team's roles.

What do you want to be doing today?

What do you wish you could be accomplishing within the next 6-9 months?
Do you want more ownership of a slice of product of a feature? Are there some responsibilities you wish you had? Do you want cross-platform experience?

What do you want to be doing in 1 year?

What's a slightly larger vision you have? This will be something that'll eventually break down into discrete, actionable steps.

What do you want to be doing in 3 years?

Would you like to be: working on a different platform; have a different role; be working at your dream company? Why?

What do you want to be doing in 8 years?

At this timeframe, we should be touching on your wider personal ambitions. It's a hard one to answer and might take a couple of check-ins to solidify.
Some prompts to get you started are: where will you live; what will you be working on; if you have other passions besides programming would you want to be exploring them; what's your dream job?

Reality

What is currently holding you back from your goals?

This could be something personal (e.g. lack of experience, burnout), process related (e.g. not involved in the spec-writing process), organisational related (e.g. role/teams are too rigid).

What are you good at that you can do more of?

Basically: do you have skills that we can leverage to help you with your goals.

What sort of opportunities are you looking for?

What are some skills that you haven't been able to grow or leverage? Within your day-to-day role, what opportunities aren't being provided?

What keeps you working here?

Why are you working for us, what keeps you happy here? By identifying these things, we can work to not introduce changes that might lessen their impact.

If you could change something about your job, what would it be?

What's the most challenging thing about your job? What do you like least?

Planning

What projects can you take on in the next 6 months to get closer to your goals?

What are some realistic projects you could complete/accomplish over the next 6 months? These will be broken down into 6-week chunks each check-in.

What tasks can you complete in the next 6 weeks to complete your projects (above)?

Put your action items here. These should be tasks that can be completed by the next career check-in

@Joan Citizen Write onboarding documentation for incoming intern by 08 Oct 2020

What help will you need to get to those goals?

What can others (manager, peers) do to remove blockers, or to give opportunities?

How will we know that you're on track?

Typically linked to the action items above: "Completing all tasks I've set myself".
Can also be something recurring or continuous: "Spend Fix-it-Fridays improving platform documentation", "Finish work by 5:30pm every day", "Spend 2hrs a week focused on documentation".

What have you done so far?

List off projects that you've accomplished, including any necessary context so that come performance review time it still makes sense.
This should get updated on a regular basis, and should include all projects of merit, not just projects that are outlined in this meeting.
By filling this out both you and your mentor have examples of work completed. This will serve you well come review time.