No One Is Coming to Sort Out Your Career. Annoying, But True.

The 10 career moves senior leaders will wish they made 12 months ago.

A year from now, you may be sitting in one of two places.

You might be in a bigger, better, more aligned role. More influence. More choice. More confidence. Fewer quiet moments wondering whether you should have done something about your career back when you still had the chance.

Or you might be exactly where you are now, still thinking, “I really should update my CV.” That sentence has ruined more career momentum than most restructures.

This is not an article about resigning. It is not a polite nudge to print your resume, steal the good pens and sprint for the exit.

It is about readiness.

It is also about control. Doing a good job in your current role still matters. A lot. You do not build future career options by getting bored, quietly checking out, waiting to be discovered, or letting frustration leak into your work. The best next move is usually built on two things happening at once: delivering strongly in your job now, and managing the narrative about what you want to be known for next.

The same career work applies whether you want to stay with your current organisation, step up internally, reshape your role, or move somewhere new. The best opportunities rarely arrive when your documents are polished, your network is warm and your story is tight. They arrive on a Wednesday afternoon when you are in back-to-back meetings and your LinkedIn profile still says you are “passionate about excellence”. Nobody needs that.

As Stoke Consulting explored in A Bias For Action, a plan is more useful than a thought. Careers are no different. Future you does not need another good intention. Future you needs you to start.

1. Work out your aiming point

Before you update anything, ask a more useful question: where are you trying to get to?

Not just the title. Not just the salary. Not just the company logo that looks impressive on LinkedIn but may involve a boss who treats weekends as a flexible concept.

Map the variables that matter to you. Role scope. P&L or functional accountability. Industry. Culture. Values. Location. Flexibility. Risk. Learning. Purpose. Travel. Remuneration. Autonomy. The quality of the leadership team. The level of influence you want. The type of problems you actually want to solve.

Then separate the non-negotiables from the nice-to-haves. This is where many capable leaders go wrong. They say they want clarity, but they keep every option open just in case. That is not strategic. That is career FOMO wearing a tie.

Then ask: does the next move take me part of the way there, or all of the way there?

Not every move has to be the destination. Some of the smartest career decisions are stepping-stone roles that build the missing experience, credibility, network or commercial exposure required for the bigger move after that. But drifting is not a strategy. It is just movement with nicer stationery.

2. Update your resume before you need it

Most people update their resume when they see a role they want. This is too late.

By then the search consultant is waiting, the role closes tomorrow, the formatting has developed a personality disorder, and you are trying to remember what you achieved in 2019 while whispering threats at Microsoft Word.

Use the Chris Read resume template as your base. Then improve from there.

The rule is simple: do not be shy, and do not fill it out with fluff.

A senior resume should not read like a job description. It should show scope, accountability, context and results. What changed because you were there? What scale did you lead? What problem did you solve? What did you improve? What was the commercial, operational, customer, people, safety or strategic impact?

“Led transformation” is not enough. Every second person has apparently led a transformation. Some of them transformed a meeting agenda.

Get specific. Show the before, the action and the outcome. Keep a running record of achievements every quarter. You will forget half of them otherwise, usually the good half.

3. Update LinkedIn so it matches the leader you want to be seen as

Your LinkedIn profile is not just an online CV. Stoke Consulting’s LinkedIn Profile Tips: How to Enhance Your Professional Brand makes the point well: your profile should be clear, credible and useful. It should help future employers, recruiters, clients, referrers and colleagues quickly understand your experience, strengths and the work you are best placed to do.

That matters whether you are looking or not.

Your headline should say more than your current job title. Your About section should connect the dots. Your Experience section should show responsibilities and achievements. Use the language people search for: role titles, industries, capabilities, technical skills and outcomes.

Also, write like a human. Nobody wants to read that you “leverage cross-functional synergies to optimise stakeholder-centric outcomes”. That sentence should be taken outside and given a quiet farewell.

Make it accurate. Make it searchable. Make it sound like you.

4. Build your network before you need your network

Networking when you urgently need a job is like starting a fitness program the day before a marathon. Admirable, but the timing is bold.

Connect with people you meet through work, industry events, clients, suppliers, professional associations, alumni groups, community boards, sport, school networks and personal circles. Within reason, obviously. The person who fixed your dishwasher does not need a 700-word leadership update from you.

The LinkedIn profile guide recommends treating your network as a living relationship tool, not a pile of digital business cards. Another Stoke Consulting article, Why Endorsing on LinkedIn is Undervalued but High Impact, is also worth revisiting. Endorsing others is a simple, generous way to build goodwill, stay visible and remind people you exist without asking for anything.

Be useful before you need help. Comment thoughtfully. Congratulate people. Introduce good people to other good people. Share something relevant. Have the coffee. Then, when a role is being discussed quietly, you are not a stranger appearing from the bushes with a resume.

5. Build your interview technique before the big interview

Interviewing is a skill. Senior leaders sometimes forget this because they have spent years interviewing other people. Unfortunately, being good on the other side of the table does not automatically make you good as the candidate.

Stoke Consulting’s Senior Leader Interview Questions are built around behavioural evidence. That is the key phrase: evidence, not vibes. The questions test how you have actually behaved across areas such as strategy delivery, performance through people, partnership building, influencing, customer intimacy, information sharing, visible leadership, growth drive, capability development and change leadership.

The attached ACTS behavioural competencies are also a useful way to frame your preparation: Accountability, Collaboration, Transparency and Stretch. Conveniently, these are also the sorts of things senior roles tend to require. Funny that.

Build at least five strong stories. Not 27 rambling war stories. Five sharp ones.

• One that shows strategy and commercial impact.
• One that shows performance through people.
• One that shows influence and stakeholder management.
• One that shows change, growth or innovation.
• One that shows visible leadership, values and judgement under pressure.

Use a simple structure: situation, action, outcome. Stoke Consulting’s guide uses Structure, Action, Outcome for competency-based answers. In plain English: set the scene, say what you did, then explain what changed.

Write the stories down. Test them. Tighten them. Say them out loud. The first time you hear your own answer should not be when the CEO is staring at you across a boardroom table and the chair is squeaking.

The aim is not to sound rehearsed. The aim is to be ready.

6. Practise your leadership brand narrative

Almost every senior career conversation contains the same silent question: so, who are you as a leader?

Too many leaders answer by walking through their career history in chronological order, including at least one role nobody asked about. This is not a narrative. It is a museum tour.

Stoke Consulting’s Busy Is Not a Leadership Brand makes a sharp point: leadership brand is the pattern people experience in how you show up, respond under pressure, make time and communicate priorities. Busy describes effort. Leaders need to communicate impact.

So practise your answer. What are you known for? What do people trust you to do? What environments bring out your best? What sort of leader are you when the pressure is high and the easy options have disappeared?

Do not memorise a script. Build a narrative: clear, human, specific and believable.

7. Choose the Ted Lasso mindset: believe

At some point, career movement becomes emotional.

You can have the resume, the LinkedIn profile, the stories, the network and the recruiter conversations, and still hesitate. You will wonder whether you are ready. You will notice every weakness. You will imagine other candidates arriving with better titles, sharper suits and more impressive acronyms.

This is where the Ted Lasso mindset helps.

Believe.

Not in a naive, motivational-poster way. Believe in the disciplined sense. Believe enough to prepare properly. Believe enough to make the call. Believe enough to ask for advice. Believe enough to put your hand up. Believe enough to recover when the answer is no.

Confidence often arrives after action, not before it. Annoying, but true.

8. Use SEEK as radar, then work the hidden market

Keep an eye on SEEK and other job boards. They are useful. They show you titles, salary bands, capability language, industry demand and the way organisations are describing leadership roles.

But do not confuse the advertised market with the whole market.

You will often hear that a large proportion of roles are never advertised. Whether the number is 70 percent in your exact market or not is less important than the practical point: many senior roles are shaped through networks, referrals, succession discussions, executive search and direct conversations before they ever appear online.

This is also the right place to read Richard Triggs’ Uncover The Hidden Job Market: How to Find and Win Your Next Senior Executive Role. Use it as a practical prompt, not another book to nod at wisely and leave on the bedside table. Define your target market, identify organisations and decision-makers, speak with people before there is a role, and follow the process bravely. Not the comfortable version. The actual version.

Treat job boards as radar. Not the whole plan. As Stoke Consulting notes in Stop Retreating: 10 Ways to Grow When Others Pull Back, when others get defensive, there can be an opportunity to push forward. The same applies to careers. Do not just sit in the advertised market with everyone else hitting refresh.

9. Network: have coffees, ask questions, be curious

Have more coffees. Ask better questions. Listen properly.

Stoke Consulting’s Talking About Nothing is a useful reminder that not every valuable conversation is tightly structured and agenda-driven. Casual, unstructured conversations can build trust, reveal hidden dynamics and strengthen relationships.

And when you are at conferences or industry events, revisit How to Behave at Conferences (Without Becoming “That Person”). The best networkers ask decent questions, listen properly and do not scan the room for someone more important while you are mid-sentence. A shocking standard, apparently, but still worth naming.

Do not make every coffee a pitch. Ask what people are seeing. Ask what is changing. Ask what capabilities are becoming more valuable. Ask what they would do if they were in your position.

Then follow up. Not with a 14-paragraph recap. Just a note. A thank you. A useful article. A connection. A small act that keeps the relationship alive.

10. Use recruiters deliberately and build up

Recruiters can be useful. They are not magic. They are also not your therapist, priest, career parent or unpaid brand consultant. Go in prepared.

Start with conversations that help you practise your story. Speak with recruiters active in your sector. Learn what questions they ask. Notice where your narrative is strong and where it starts to fog up like a windscreen in winter.

Then build up.

Third-tier recruiters can be useful for practice and market scanning. Second-tier recruiters can help sharpen your positioning. First-tier executive search firms become more relevant when your aiming point, resume, LinkedIn profile, five stories and leadership narrative are already clear.

At the top end, people often use the shorthand SHREK for Spencer Stuart, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds Associates, Egon Zehnder and Korn Ferry. By the time you are in those conversations, you want to sound like a leader with a clear proposition, not someone still workshopping their headline.

Recruiters remember clarity. They also remember vagueness. Try to be in the first category.

Start today

Stoke Consulting’s Now’s The Time To Plant That Tree is written for businesses, but the message works just as well for careers: the second-best time to plant the tree is now.

In 12 months, you will wish you had started today.

So start today.

• Spend 90 minutes clarifying your aiming point.
• Update the resume.
• Fix the LinkedIn profile.
• Reconnect with ten people.
• Book one coffee.
• Write two of your five interview stories.
• Practise your leadership narrative out loud.

You do not need to do everything this week. You do need to begin.

Future you will thank you. Probably not with flowers. But with more choice, more confidence and fewer late-night resume emergencies.

Stoke Consulting has supported hundreds of managers and senior leaders to win promotions, reposition themselves, and move into new, more satisfying roles, up to and including CEO level. The pattern is rarely magic. It is clarity, preparation, evidence, confidence and a network that knows what you stand for. Annoying, perhaps. Useful, definitely. Need a practical sounding board for the next move? Talk to Stoke Consulting.

Stoke Consulting