Map Your Career: 5 Visual Tools to Find Clarity and Direction

Squiggly Careers

AmazingIf

Business, Management, Careers

4.9 • 838 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on the Squiggly Careers podcast, Sarah and Helen borrow brilliance from an unexpected source — maps. Inspired by Jürgen Appelo’s Substack post “I Started Drawing Maps”, they explore how mapping can help you find clarity, confidence and direction in your squiggly career. You’ll hear about five different types of maps you can create to understand yourself and your work better — from mapping your energy and relationships to visualising your skills, possibilities and problems. Episode 504 🦞 Pre-order Learn Like A Lobster: PRH US - https://bit.ly/3KxTeBn Amazon UK - https://amzn.to/3KcRZaR ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction — Borrowing brilliance from maps 01:00 Why maps matter for our squiggly careers 06:40 The value of visuals for clarity and creativity 08:37 Map 1: Energy Map 13:30 Map 2: Give–Gain Map 18:45 Map 3: Skills Map 24:15 Map 4: Possibilities Map 30:00 Map 5: Problem Map 38:00 How to pick the right map for you 🎯 What You’ll Learn - How visual thinking can bring clarity to your career - Five creative ways to map your work and growth - How to use maps for reflection, self-awareness, and team development - Practical examples you can try right away 📚 Resources Mentioned I Started Drawing Maps by Jürgen Appelo https://substack.jurgenappelo.com/p/i-started-drawing-maps The Secret Language of Maps — Stanford Design School https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Language-Maps-Stanford-D-School/dp/1984858009 AI Skills Sprint: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNQl9gsac8BXnWe2qoGuHkLKwsygjP_Ma&si=5fD8VGW4Z46LgJFr For questions about Squiggly Careers or to share feedback, please email helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com More ways to learn about Squiggly Careers: 📩 Download our free career tools: https://www.amazingif.com/toolkit/ 📮 Get Squiggly Careers in Action in your inbox: https://bit.ly/SquigglyCareersInAction 📚 Read our books: The Squiggly Career and You Coach You: https://www.amazingif.com/books/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast. And before you listen to today's episode, I just
0:05.0	want to let you know about some news that Sarah and I are very excited about. And that is that our new book,
0:09.8	Learn Like a Lobster, is ready to pre-order now. We really care about everybody learning and growing
0:16.2	at work, but we know it is not easy to do. And so we're borrowing some brilliance from lobsters to help you to do it.
0:22.9	The book takes three inspiring and surprising abilities of lobsters in terms of how they grow
0:29.0	and applies it to how we can learn at work. So if you want some inspiration and you need some
0:34.0	practical insights to support your learning, growth and development. This is the book for you.
0:38.9	And if you pre-order now and send your pre-order to hello at learn like a lobster.com,
0:43.8	you can join the lobster library where we have a community of lobster learners ready for you to learn with,
0:50.1	some live sessions, and this will all happen before the book arrives.
0:55.4	So pre-order the book now,
1:00.7	send it to hello at learn like a lobster.com and get started with your learning straight away.
1:06.8	Now let's get on to today's episode. Today is our first attempt to borrow brilliance from an object and that object is maps. One of the really important component parts of a map that makes them
1:13.4	particularly helpful is that they are visual. And actually when you look at lots of examples
1:17.5	of career maps, there's a real lack of visuals.
1:22.8	Map number one is an energy map. Every day, I would just ask myself, when did I have the most energy today?
1:29.7	And when did I have the least energy?
1:31.7	But give gain map. You think about the people in your career that you support and who support you.
1:37.9	Skills mapping, there are the skills that you want to stretch and the skills that maybe you want to invest more in. Career possibility
1:46.1	mapping. Lots of people get sort of stuck in their career. So we're trying to encourage a little
1:51.1	bit of curiosity here and use possibility mapping as a way to do that. Problem mapping. How could you
1:56.1	use a map to sort of make sense of that problem so that you're not just going around in circles,
	...

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