I have spent years sitting with engineers who are brilliant at their work and completely lost in their careers. Not because they lack talent. Because nobody ever asked them the right questions.
Most career advice skips the hard part. It tells you to update your LinkedIn, learn a new skill, optimize your resume. It assumes the problem is visibility. It is usually not. The problem is that somewhere along the way, you started building someone else’s version of your career accumulated from advice, from what got rewarded, from the slow pressure of other people’s definitions of growth.
I built this template after one too many conversations where someone asked me: where do I even start.
It is not a job search checklist. It is a set of questions to ask yourself before you touch any of that. Starting with the one that matters most is the direction you are moving actually yours.
There are four stages. The first one has nothing to do with the market. It has everything to do with you.
