Matthew's blog 15 April 2011

Next 5 years

I spent Tuesday morning this week talking to a room of about 15 people working in housing who had been brought together by the Housing Diversity Network ("HDN"). HDN specialises in providing consultancy　and training on equality and diversity issues to the social housing sector.

I was speaking about Career Paths in housing and, before I spoke, I asked everyone in the room to say a few words on what their career plans were. I was astonished to find that almost everyone said:

• They would be really interested in a change in their job; but that
• They had no specific plans for how they wanted their careers to change in the next few years.

The next speaker after me was David Blackburn of Shepherds Bush Housing Group. He began his talk saying that everyone in any job should ask themselves 3 questions:

• What do you need to change to do your current job better?
• Where do you want to be in 5 years?
• What do you need to do to get there?

Those seem to me to be great questions, particularly the last 2. I think that we all ask ourselves the first question quite a lot, but I was struck that we don’t really ask ourselves the second 2…and we really should. At a time when we are all in the midst of the Annual Appraisal process, shouldn’t we be thinking not just about the next year but about the next 5 to 10 years? For my part, I will make a point of asking it of as many people as I can as I travel around Viridian in the weeks ahead.