Annual Career Planning Strategy: Reflect, Plan, and Achieve in 2025

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you are all ready because this is the start of a really exciting year for your career, maybe your job search. I always feel a lot of energy in the new year and I'm not alone. Studies show that things like a new year, a new season, a fresh start give people a lot of motivation. So let's harness that by doing some annual planning together. I'm going to take you through my entire planning strategy, what I do personally, including the framework I use, the reasons I do it, and some of the things I do to keep myself on track. And next week I'm going to share a very special tool that I made just for you, totally free, that's going to help you do this planning more efficiently. And I'm mixing in a little AI because I think that'll be really beneficial to you and I think it's fun. So let's get to planning.

I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of.

A talent strategy consulting firm.

I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees.

So I know what works and what.

Doesn'T work when it comes to landing.

A job and then excelling in it.

I created the Biotech Career Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're.

In the right place. At the end of last year, 2024, I wrote a column for Biospace that was all about reflecting on what you have accomplished in 2024 and I want to springboard on that because that is actually step one of my planning process. You really can't look forward without looking back. I firmly believe that doing a yearly reflection and thinking about all of the things you achieve is really, really important in this process because it's going to give you clarity. You can accomplish more in a year than you actually realize. And admiring those accomplishments, celebrating your achievements and acknowledging what fell short, where did you not quite make it and what can you learn from that and how can you do things maybe a little more efficiently or with a different approach next year so that you are successful in your goals. So let's start with a journaling exercise. You are going to write a letter to your Future self dated 1231 2025. So that's one year from now. And in that letter you are going to celebrate your year as if it happens. So you're going to celebrate your promotion or your new job or filing that IND or whatever it is that you're really excited to do this year. Celebrate it, congratulate yourself on it, talk about how it made you feel and get really granular about it because that's going to internalize the feeling of accomplishment and it's going to motivate you to achieve it. Then I want you to do two more short letters to yourself. These ones, maybe you don't have to be quite as in depth because they're further out, but you're going to write a letter to your future self in three years and in five years again dated 1231. So that would be 2028 and 2030. And those are going to serve as the foundation for your three and five year plan. So you don't have to get as granular with those ones because we're not going to necessarily break them down in our planning session. But knowing the big dream that you're going for, that's going to keep you on track for the littler steps. So as an example, maybe you are fairly new to biotech, maybe you're in your first role right now and your five year plan is to be a principal scientist leading a team. Maybe you are already a principal scientist and your five year goal is to be a director leading a department. So get a little bit bold with these dreams. Think about what would really make you happy, think about why it makes you happy also and write that into your letter. Why is it fulfilling? Why are you excited about what you're doing? What gets you up every morning? Those are gonna be the basis of what make you tick. And those are gonna be the things that keep you marching forward when inevitably things don't go to plan. Step two is my actual planning framework and it's not mine. I absolutely stole this from very wise people who came before me. You are going to need to break these big goals into manageable pieces, little chunks. And so the first thing we're going to do is think of these aspirational letters that you wrote as truth. If they were true, if they came true and you accomplished the things in your letters, what else would have to be true? So for example, if you are hoping to get that director role and manage a whole department, in order for that to be true, you're probably going to need to get a series of other promotions. In the meantime, you're probably going to need to hone your leadership skills. You might need to move to a new company. There might be a few different things that you realize have to be true for yourself in order to get to those ending milestones. So think broadly for your three and your five year plan, and think very granularly for your one year plan this year. If you were to accomplish what you are celebrating with yourself on December 31, 2025, what needs to be true? Do you need to take a course? Do you need to develop a new skill? Do you need a different job? Do you need a promotion? How about a new technique? What needs to be true? Write that down. The second thing you're going to want to do is write down the time horizon for each of the things that need to be true. If you need to learn a new technique, how long will that take you? And write a quick plan for that too. We'll get to that in a moment. But if you need to, for instance, go work in a collaborator's lab to learn that technique, that might mean that you have to plan for it. You have to think about when that could be accomplished and how long would you need to actually be working in that lab to accomplish that goal. Be sure to include on this list anything that's relevant. These could be personal development goals, professional development goals, project milestones, or different learning initiatives that are going to be valuable to your end goal. We're going to call these milestones and mini milestones. So a milestone is going to be something that is going to take you perhaps a few months to accomplish. And mini milestones are the pieces that make up that big milestone. So in my example of learning a new technique, if you need to go to a collaborator's lab, but you would need three weeks to learn a technique, learning the technique is the milestone. The mini milestones would be something like, first, I need to figure out when I'm going to do it this year, so I need to get that on the calendar. Second, I need to arrange my workload so that nobody on my team is put out by me leaving and stepping away to go learn this new technique. Third, I'm going to need to maybe put in a couple of other skills into place so that I'm ready to go learn this technique. And then fourth would be the actual time you spend learning the techniques. So those are the mini milestones that make up the big milestone. Take a little time and write things down and think deeply about what it would take to accomplish each of your bigger milestones that lead to your bigger goals. I do have a caveat here. I see a lot of people get very energized by this process and set big lofty goals. And they're not realistic about the timeline for these milestones and mini milestones. And that's really natural. I just want to caution you that you still only have 24 hours in a day and you need to be sleeping, eating, hanging out with your family and friends, being kind to yourself for a good portion of those hours. Your workload is still going to take some percentage of your time as well. You may have to dedicate a little bit of extra time outside of your traditional workload to accomplish some of your goals, especially if they require learning and developing your own skills, either your personal or professional skills, on your own time. Keep all this in mind when you're actually thinking of these time horizons, because nothing burns someone out faster than missing some of these mini milestones and getting discouraged and then losing momentum toward their plan. All right, part three, you've definitely heard of before. We're going to put these milestones and mini milestones into smart goals. So using the time horizons and the map that you have created towards your big goals, you're going to think about smart goals. Now, SMART is an acronym. There are a lot of different variations out there, but let me just say they all have a few things in common. So I'm going to go with the tried and true SMART framework. This is you need to be very specific with your goals. You're going to want to determine how and when you're going to measure progress toward your goals. And you need to be sure that all of your goals are extremely achievable and realistic. And so SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. So that's S M A R T smart. You will see again other variations. You'll see smarter, smartest, all this stuff. But let me just say the basics are smart. So you're going to break down your list of goals into smart goals. So as an example, let's go back to learning that new technique. So specific is a clearly defined objective, not just I need to learn mass spec, but why? What's the motivation behind it? I need to learn mass spec so that I can contribute more deeply to our upcoming IND filing. You want to be specific because it's going to give you a little motivation. Measurable. So how are you going to quantify the progress that you are making toward this goal? Well, if you know nothing about mass spec right now, and at the end you are going to be a mass spec expert, there's going to be a continuum of learning throughout that process so you can get a little creative on how you're going to measure that. Some other goals are going to be very clearly measurable, right? If you have a goal outside of work that's read 52 books in a year, so a book a week that is very easy to track, you can clearly plot that out. Learning a technique might be a little less clear cut, but there are still milestones that you can use to measure your success there. And so part of that is going to be in the next section. We're going to talk about how you're going to set up some strategy meetings on this, but think about how you would measure that success and write it down. Achievable. So if instead of learn mass spec, your goal is learn mass spec better than anyone in the whole world, first of all, I don't know how you would measure that. But second, that's probably not as achievable as being very proficient in mass spec to the point where your company is pleased and promotes you. So what are you actually going for? Let's make sure that we are setting achievable goals. Relevant Is the RN smart? Why is this relevant? Well, you should have also outlined that a little bit in your specific but if it's relevant because there isn't somebody on the team who knows mass spec and rather than hiring somebody externally or spending money on a consultant, you are making the case to your manager to develop you in that skill set so that your skills grow. You can fill that hole for the company and it's needed for an upcoming filing. Those are all very relevant things. So how are you going to market this to your company? Especially if you need to get some funding for it or some time to step away and learn something, this is where the relevance comes in and you're going to want to clearly define that so that you are ready to argue your case if you need to. And the last one t is time bound. So what is your time horizon for this? If you would like to learn mass spec by June, that gives you six months. That's two quarters or 23 weeks. However you want to kind of break it down. Right? How are you going to define this for your planning purposes? Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech. I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show. And this brings me to the fourth step in my framework, which is to get some buy in from your manager. So most of us are going to have a manager or a supervisor. Some of us may not, and we may instead have an executive coach or a mentor. But in any case, find someone who is invested in your success and who has expertise in helping develop people. This is the person you want to sit down with. Now that you've outlined your smart goals and make your case. Talk to them about why these goals are important. Why are they specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound? How are you going to accomplish them and how does this fit into the bigger picture of the company's goals and your own career goals and get their feedback? This person is probably a very good person to bounce ideas around with to refine your goals and maybe they have a lot of faith in you and they might add to your list as well, who knows. But this is a really important part of the equation and if you have listened to this podcast or read my column at all, you know that I'm a big fan of regular meetings with this person. So whether it's your supervisor, manager, your mentor, meeting regularly with someone who's invested in your success is important to keep momentum. So you're going to want to have, in my opinion, weekly check ins, maybe just 15 minutes where you go through. What have you accomplished since the last meeting? Where are you in the current list of goals and adjust the goals and deadlines as needed and then maybe once a month you sit down for a bit of a deeper dive and really think through, okay, we've accomplished this much in the month. Where does that leave us? What do we need to adjust going forward and really dig into things with them? You need to be taking notes during and after these sessions, not just for your manager, but also for your career. Last month's column I talked about doing that annual review and I touched on it at the beginning of this podcast. But what's interesting is that a lot of my career development clients that I'm coaching have not been good over the years at jotting down their accomplishments and measuring their success. And then when it comes time to updating their Resume or their LinkedIn, it's hard because they don't have a real record. They know they accomplished things, but really thinking about their impact in a quantifiable way is difficult when you're looking back. It's much easier to do in the moment. So I'm setting you up with these smart goals to be measuring things from the beginning. It's going to make it much easier when you come to your yearly review that you do for yourself. Also going to make it easier when you come to your company's annual review. Typically, we want to make a good case for what we've done in the year. And if you're angling for a promotion as one of your goals, you're definitely going to want to be advocating for yourself. So keeping track of all of your accomplishments as quantifiably as you can is really important, and it's going to give you a leg up as it comes to your annual planning or your review. So the last section is fun. I love to implement systems around my goals to make them easier. And I'm going to talk about a couple of things that really help with building habits. I may use habit and goal interchangeably because in my mind you can think about putting in the work toward your goals as a habit. It should be a daily habit. You're doing a little bit every day to get yourself to that end point. The first thing that I love to do for myself is calendar blocking. I am inundated with meetings unless I preserve my calendar every week on Fridays I do a weekly review and I look forward for two weeks in my calendar and I make sure nothing weird is going on in my calendar. I don't have overlapping appointments or double bookings. And I take the time to think about what my goals are for those next two weeks and block them onto the calendar. So the most important thing, the M.I.T. we call it, is the thing that will get you one step closer to accomplishing your goal. What is the highest impact thing that you can do right now or this week or next week that is going to drive progress forward on your goal? That MIT needs to go on your calendar if your company allows it. Block it off with a hard, busy block so that nobody can book over it and take that valuable time for you. It doesn't have to be a lot of time, but most people who practice time blocking will tell you that they get more done in the one to two hours of focused time blocked deep work than they do for the rest of the day, where they're just putting out fires, answering emails, doing the odd meeting. You are so scattered throughout your day, Giving yourself the mental space to sit down and focus on what you really care about is going to be such a gift to yourself in 2025. The next thing that I love to do is bring the whole community into my goals. There is a lot of research that shows that when you share your goals, you're more likely to achieve them. So tell your friends, tell your family, tell the rest of your team what your goals are. Bring them into your circle of trust and allow them to support you in this. And encourage them to share their goals and their habits, their resolutions with you, and hold them accountable too. Mutual accountability is infectious. Getting things done is infectious. So allow them to help and support you. And then the last little system that I think is really valuable for forming new habits and working toward goals is to create systems that are based on your life. You need this to fit into your life. You don't want to totally upend your life. If you want to get better at managing people, you may invest in a management course and maybe your company will help you pay for this. And that may require some independent study time. And for that, maybe it's 30 minutes a day where you really want to sit down with the materials and study. So I like to think of if, then statements. And without realizing it, a lot of things that you do in your life already fall into this. Just answer yes or no in your head. Do you brush your teeth every morning? Yes or no? Most people, I would hope, are yes. I'm definitely a yes. And my if then for brushing my teeth is if I get out of bed, then I brush my teeth. So although if then statements are the most grammatically correct, we have so many of these already in our life. And the good, healthy habits that we've all cultivated over the years often fit neatly into these if then statements without us even realizing it. You don't really need to think about most of your morning routine. It just happens. You don't need to really think about most of your evening routine. It just happens. So how can you arrange your life so that the things you need to do to work toward your goal just happen. My husband and I found out that we're both vitamin E deficient and so we have to take a vitamin E pill every day. Well, we tried to do this pretty unsuccessfully for the first few weeks by leaving it in the medicine cabinet, but neither of us really thought about it. And so it just kept not happening. So I got smart about it and I realized, you know what we never skip doing? We never skip making coffee. So we put the vitamin E tablet bottle in the coffee maker and that's where it lives. We have one of those single serve coffee machines where we can brew directly into our travel mugs. And we both use travel mugs, actually, I've got mine right here. And we actually put the bottle in where the travel mug goes. We have to physically move the bottle in order to put the mug in. And that time to brew our coffee is the perfect opportunity to go get a glass of water and take that pill and then replace the pill right back in the place where the mug goes for the next person. And guess what? We never miss a dose anymore. So that is if, then if I make coffee, then I take my vitamin E. Easy. So let's put this into perspective for your career. How about if I eat lunch, then I read a chapter of my leadership book. You're probably going to eat lunch and you might as well just read while you do it. If I go to work, then I will dedicate the first hour to my mit. So every day that you go to work, you're going to work on your mit, because that's the first thing you do every day. It's like clockwork. What other systems can you come up with to neatly fit your goals into your life without having to remember them or feel like you're upending your whole existence just to make these goals happen? All right, that is the framework. So first of all, you need to do your look backs, journal about last year and think deeply about what you accomplished. Maybe update your Resume and your LinkedIn while you're at it. Then you want to write yourself three letters. One for December 31, 2025, one for December 21, 2028, and one for December 31, 2030. So you have a one year, a three year and a five year letter congratulating yourself on the wonderful things you achieved. Then you're gonna break down those achievements as if they've already happened into milestones and mini milestones so that you can develop a plan for each quarter of this year. You're gonna take those milestones and mini milestones and put them into smart goals so that you have a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound set of goals. Next, you're going to pull your manager or your supervisor or a trusted coach or mentor into the equation to help you audit these smart goals and then develop a check in routine so that they can help you march toward achieving them. And then you just have to stick to your guns. And so to recap, the three things that I do to develop new good habits and to work toward my goals are to time block, to allow my village to help me, and to develop habits that already fit into my life by associating them with other things I'm already doing. I will say that this takes some time. I usually book a half day every year to do this big thorough annual planning. And then each quarter I sit down for maybe two hours and I reflect back on the quarter and I make sure that I'm on track or adjust for the next quarter. Planning is a time investment and it will come back to you. Many fold people who spend time planning execute more confidently and they do less extraneous work because they know it's not important for the thing they need to focus on. I look forward to my planning because I actually do it at my favorite coffee shop and they have really good breakfast and lunch. So I plan to go usually right as the breakfast crowd is leaving so that I can get both breakfast and lunch there and a slew of delicious caffeine beverages. And I just make a little half day of it. And I love it because it's me time. And it's time that I'm filled with hope and big dreams and aspirations and I feel so energized afterward. Like I said, I am creating a tool for you. It's going to be a notion template that is totally free to use. It's going to help outline all of the steps in this process and it's going to give you tools to track the goals you come up with and to kind of collate your notes and your measurable outcomes. So so that when it comes time for the end of the year, it's easy to look back. You can look back really at any time and you can make sure that you're on track. And I love using AI in fun ways. So I'm going to help you to incorporate a few AI prompts into this that are going to help you to develop those smart goals faster. Because it takes practice to do really good smart goals. And that way you get to the step of working with your manager on them and getting that feedback faster. So stay tuned for that. I'm going to release that next week. My monthly biospace Career Coach column is going to be the content of this. So if you want to review this in more of a formulaic written out way, it will be released, I believe, next Thursday. So you'll be able to grab that column and really see this all written out step by step, each little piece of the framework so that you are armed and ready. You're going to have that. You're going to have your template. Go find a great coffee shop and make yourself an annual planning ritual that you start to look forward to just as much as I do. All right, that is all for this week. I hope you enjoyed it, and bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the.

Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. To join our free Slack group and.

To get access to other great free.

Resources and materials, head over to CollaboratoryCareerHub.com and be sure to connect with me.

On LinkedIn Pro Tip.

When you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire networking of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to helloollaboratorycareerhub.com we'll give you totally free access to our popular LinkedIn course so that you can learn all of the secrets behind creating a magnetic LinkedIn profile that drives your career forward. Have an amazing week and we'll see.

You back here next Friday.