What is the Wheel of Career?
The Wheel of Career is a reflective exercise you can use to check-in with yourself and assess your current career fulfillment.
It highlights what contributes to your satisfaction at work and dissatisfaction, and helps you figure out areas that need attention. By breaking your career into eight key categories, the wheel provides a holistic view and allows you to spot imbalances. While not every area needs to rank high, if most of them are low, that’s worth paying attention to.
Benefits of the Wheel of Career
The benefits of doing the Wheel of Career include:
Enhances self-awareness
Helps you assess your satisfaction with various aspects of your career. Prompts you to pinpoint what contributes to your fulfillment and what drives frustration.
Aids in prioritizing and intentional career planning
When you identify areas needing change, this guides you in setting meaningful goals and determining your next steps.
Encourages action-taking
With greater clarity, you can strategically plan and prioritize your career decisions.
Prompts course correction
Helps you adjust your path as your goals and circumstances evolve.
Career categories
When you do the Wheel of Career, you can use any (or all) of the categories below or replace these with others that that are more meaningful to your specific circumstances.
- Values Alignment
- Purpose Alignment
- Professional Relationships
- Strengths & Skills
- Development and Growth
- Money
- Stability
- Creativity
- Work/Life Integration
- Work Environment
Questions to get further clarity on some of the segments
Asking yourself the questions below will help you get clarity on your score for each category. I recognize that these are close-ended questions; for the purpose of this activity, that’s what’s helpful.
Values alignment: Do my values match the values expressed and demonstrated in my workplace. If you’re not sure what your values are, check out this worksheet.
Purpose Alignment: Does this job align with my purpose? Your purpose doesn’t have to be something grandiose or approved by others. You get to decide. If you’re not sure what your purpose is, SEE
Professional Relationships: Do I have good working relationships with your colleagues/workmates?
Am I building a professional network in my workplace? What about externally?
Strengths & Skills: Am I using my strengths regularly and in a way that feels good?
Development and Growth: Have I had opportunities to develop?
Am I developing skills and strengths that I’m excited about growing?
Money: Am I making sufficient money, in whatever way I define that?
Stability: Does my work provide me with the stability I need?
Creativity: Does my job allow me to be creative in ways that I need?
Work/Life Integration: The meaning of work/life integration (some call it “balance”) is specific to each person. Does the integration of my work-life and personal-life feel right to me?
Work environment: Is this current work environment meeting my needs?
Steps to completing your Career Wheel
The overall gist of how to do this is that, for each of your selected categories (or slice of the pie), you will rate your level of satisfaction/fulfillment. For example, if you are highly satisfied with your income, you would colour in the entire slice of the Money section or draw a line near the top of the segment.
Steps:
- Carve out some time to reflect and do the exercise.
- Imagine that the centre of the wheel is 0 and the outer edge is 10
- For each category, check-in with yourself to see how satisfied you are.
- Draw a line across each segment rate your own satisfaction score for each category. A value between 1 (very dissatisfied) and 10 (fully satisfied).
- Don’t overthink this, go with your gut.
Here’s a sample of a Career Wheel with scores for the categories. 
Reflection & Action
- Are you surprised by any of the scores?
- Which category (categories) do you feel good about? Which are of concern?
- What would it take for you to raise the score by one or two in the segments that are of concern?
- Pick 1-3 actions to get started on today.