Using AgileZen for your career management

What is your career if not yet another project? It has it’s own iterations, goals, results. So why not manage it like a project and don’t leave it uncontrolled? I do recommend you doing so and use any project management tool for that. In this post I’ll cover basics of career management using AgileZen as a wonderful example of project management tool.

Goals are main units of career management. You usually aim for something and try to reach it – that’s a nice thing to plan and control!

Basically there are several phases (or states) for your goals:

1. Backlog – a pile of goals you haven’t yet assigned to any other phase. All new goals are placed into this phase automatically
2. Permanent goals – this is something you have to keep in mind almost every day. These goals usually are abstract and have no concrete steps. “Improve communication skills” may be an example of such a goal.
3. Long-range goals – such goals are something concrete like “Study Domain Driven Development” but you didn’t plan to reach them in the nearest future.
4. Short-range goals – such goals are also concrete and differ from long-range goals only in execution period – they will be started in nearest future.
5. In progress – such goals are executed right not, for example, you have started studying NHibernate
6. Complete – such goals are history

Each goal starts in backlog. If it’s a permanent goal – it will reside in Permanent goals section and will most likely go directly to Completed phase in the future. If it’s something concrete that should be done – it will be moved to long-range goals, then to short-range goals, then it will be started and then moved to completed goals. This is an example of career board:

AgileZen is really useful for organizing these phases and usable for creating goals and moving them all around. Goals in AgileZen may have subtasks that can help you to structure your task and complete it step by step. What is awesome – AgileZen has a Free plan that is available for single project with a single person – just what we need for managing our careers.

I use AgileZen for my career management, blogging and education and I’m absolutely happy with it. Go try it and be in control!