There is no shortage of advice about how to build a successful career. Work hard. Build your network. Find a mentor. Develop your skills. Raise your profile. Get more experience. Take the course. Read the book. Listen to the podcast. Find the next opportunity.
All of those things can be useful. But there comes a point when doing more isn’t necessarily the answer. Sometimes what you need is to stop and ask a much simpler question: What do I actually need right now?
Because career development isn’t about endlessly adding more skills, more credentials and more activity. It’s about understanding where you are, where you want to go, and what would make the greatest difference at this particular point in your career. That’s the difference between career development as another form of achievement and career development with intention.
More development isn’t always better development
I’ve spent more than 20 years working with women on their careers and leadership, and one pattern I see often is how easily development itself can become another thing to achieve. We collect courses, books, podcasts, qualifications and advice. We save articles we mean to read and sign up for programs because they sound interesting. We keep learning because learning feels productive. And as a lifelong learner myself, I understand the impulse.
But consuming more information doesn’t necessarily create change. You can know a great deal about confidence and still struggle to back yourself. You can understand the importance of boundaries and continue saying yes when you want to say no. You can know you need greater visibility and still avoid talking about your achievements. You can have read every piece of career advice available and still have no idea what you actually want next.
Knowledge matters, but so does knowing which knowledge you need and what you’re going to do with it. Instead of continually asking what else you should learn, a more useful question can be: What would be most valuable for me to work on now?
What you need changes as your career changes
There is no single formula for career development because careers aren’t linear, and neither are we. At one stage, the most important thing may be building your confidence. At another, it might be getting clear about what you want from your career and life. Later, you may need to become more visible, navigate a transition, strengthen your leadership, create better boundaries or rebuild your energy.
What you needed five years ago may have very little to do with what you need today. And yet many of us keep moving through our careers without creating enough space to ask whether our development still matches the woman we’ve become and the life we want now.
This matters particularly for women because we can spend so much of our careers responding to what is required of us. We focus on the next project, the next deadline, the needs of the team, the expectations of the organisation and the opportunities that happen to appear. We become very good at delivering what is needed.
But there is a risk in spending years responding to everything around you: you can become incredibly good at progressing through a career you haven’t consciously chosen.
Intention asks you to lift your head occasionally and come back to yourself.
Start with where you are
When I work with women on their careers, I don’t believe the starting point should be a long list of everything they need to improve. Most accomplished women can produce that list without any help at all. We are often painfully aware of our perceived gaps.
I’m much more interested in what’s happening for you now. Where are you feeling stuck? What is taking more energy than it should? Is there an opportunity you’re ready for but haven’t pursued? Are you doing excellent work but struggling to make it visible? Have you lost clarity about what you actually want? Is the way you’re currently working sustainable?
You don’t need to fix everything at once. In fact, trying to do that usually creates another impossible standard to meet. The goal is to identify the place where some focused attention could make a meaningful difference.
Sometimes that place is obvious. Sometimes it takes a little more reflection to find it.
Your career doesn’t always need to move up
I also think we need to broaden what we mean by career development.
It’s still so often framed around progression. How do I get promoted? How do I become a better leader? How do I increase my influence? How do I get to the next level?
Those can be important questions, but they aren’t the only ones.
Sometimes development means becoming clearer about what you no longer want. It might mean deciding that the next promotion isn’t worth the cost to your wellbeing, recognising that the career you’ve spent years building no longer fits, wanting more flexibility or meaning, choosing to deepen your expertise rather than move into management, or redefining ambition for the season of life you’re in.
I’ve seen this become increasingly important for women as they move through different stages of their careers and lives. The definition of success that drove you at 30 may not be the definition you want at 45 or 55. That doesn’t mean you’ve become less ambitious. It may mean you’ve become more discerning about where you want to place your ambition.
There is a meaningful difference between asking What should I do next? and What do I want next?
Focus on what matters now
Once you have some clarity about that, development becomes much more useful. If confidence is genuinely what’s holding you back, work on confidence. If you’ve lost sight of where you’re heading, spend time reconnecting with your vision. If you’re doing excellent work but nobody knows about it, visibility may deserve your attention. If you’ve stepped into leadership and feel as though you’re performing someone else’s version of what a leader should be, perhaps authentic leadership is where the work is.
And if you’re exhausted and running on empty, another productivity strategy probably isn’t what you need. Your wellbeing may be the most important investment you can make.
There will always be more you could work on. The skill is learning to discern what deserves your attention now.
Your career deserves more than your effort
Most of the women I meet don’t have an effort problem. They have worked incredibly hard. They’ve delivered, adapted, learned, supported others, taken responsibility and kept going.
But effort and intention aren’t the same thing.
Intention requires us to occasionally lift our heads from the work in front of us and look at the larger picture. To notice whether we’re still heading somewhere we want to go. To consider what we’re ready for now, what might need to change and where investing in ourselves could make the greatest difference.
You don’t need to have your entire career mapped out. I don’t think that’s particularly realistic, and some of the most meaningful career opportunities are the ones we could never have planned for anyway.
But you do need to participate consciously in creating it.
Because perhaps the next step in your career isn’t about doing more. Perhaps it’s about becoming much more intentional about what you do next.
This week we’re launching The Career Studio by Women Rising, which grew directly from this idea. Over the years, we’ve heard from so many women who wanted support in one particular area of their career or leadership, without necessarily needing the full Women Rising Program.
Career Studio gives you access to individual Women Rising Program modules, so you can focus on what matters most to you right now, whether that’s building radical confidence, creating greater clarity around your life and career, strengthening your personal brand, evolving your career, developing your authentic leadership or supporting your wellbeing.
Sometimes you don’t need more.
You need the right thing, at the right time.