Benjamin Todd

if you know your long-term vision, work out how to get there.

To come up with next steps, there are two broad approaches.

The first is to work backwards from your vision.

Think about where you'd like to end up and then identify the most direct routes to get there.

The best way to do this is to ask people in the field how someone with your background can advance most quickly.

For example, ask, if I wanted to be in role X in five years, what would I need to do?

Also, look for examples of people who have advanced unusually quickly and figure out how they did it.

Think about which types of career capital will be most important.

For example, Bill Clinton knew that to succeed in politics, he'd need to know a lot of people, so even as an undergraduate, he kept a list of everyone he'd met on a paper notepad.

We do some of this analysis in our career reviews, but there's no substitute for getting personal advice on the best next steps for you.

If you're feeling uncertain about a longer-term option, another question to consider is, how might I eliminate that option?

Is there something you could do that would decisively tell you whether pursuing that longer-term path made sense or not?

Working forwards.

Look at the opportunities immediately in front of you.

That said, it's important not to get wedded to a particular pathway.

Most great careers also involve working forwards, being alert to the opportunities that happen to be in front of you, following your nose and going with what's working, even if you're not sure where it'll eventually lead.

One reason is the inherent unpredictability of career success.

Another reason is because next steps vary so much in how promising they are, so the variation between specific jobs can trump the variation between broad career paths.

For example, maybe you think bio-risk policy is more pressing than nuclear risk policy on average.

But if you find a job in nuclear policy with an unusual amount of responsibility or that's an unusually good fit for you, or where you work with a great mentor, it could easily be better to work in nuclear policy.