Mind Mapping to Assess Your Career Strengths & Weaknesses

When it comes to your career, you need to be as innovative, productive, and as forward moving as possible. If you don’t, then your career and future prospects will stagnate and leave you feeling miserable.  There are many tools that you can utilize in order to unleash your creativity, make yourself more productive and generate more opportunities. Mind mapping is one of them.

First, let’s take a look at what mind mapping is.

Mind mapping is a way of brainstorming on paper. It is extremely beneficial as it is a visual tool that stimulates creative thinking preparing you to organize, evaluate, and analyze data around you and your career. Normally when you brainstorm ideas you will do it in a group, with several other people and you’ll debate the pros and cons of an idea.  However you may be reluctant to include others when it’s something as personal as your career, and that’s where mindmapping comes in. Mindmapping is like brainstorming with yourself on paper.

To begin with, you place your job title in the center of the paper. Your job title is now the central character in the mind mapping system. Next, you branch out what you do from your job title, and continue to branch out new words in a circle around your job title.

You’ll quickly discover that it’s similar to choosing a theme and several subthemes or topics and subtopics. The next step is to break down what each task involves. At a glance you’ll be able to see areas that are strong (they’ll have lots of sub topics) and areas that need improving.

The more you extend the circles and branch them out, the more creative you will become in completing them. As you complete them you’ll discover that you may have a lot more skills than you though you had, but as I mentioned before you’ll also know where your weaknesses are.

What Are the Benefits of Mind Mapping your Career?

Mind mapping offers several benefits:

• Mind mapping is a visual tool.
• It helps you to organize information,
• Creates new concepts and themes
• Stretches your imagination,
• Analyzes and visualizes ideas on paper

Mind mapping is an excellent tool to evaluate the strengths of your career and indicate what you need to do to improve, to take your role to the next level or obtain your next promotion. By placing future roles on your mindmap, you can visually pinpoint where your strengths are, and you can gain momentum by brainstorming creative and innovative ideas to get to where you need to be.

Mind mapping is also useful when it comes to examining career weaknesses. Weak areas are highly visible when using mind mapping. This is useful because sometimes a discussion about weaknesses does not produce any tangible results for improvement. However, using mind mapping creates a visual board for where weaknesses lie and shows you where you need to work on your career.

If you want to explore career opportunities that you can take advantage of, mind mapping is an excellent tool for this. If you have one or two tried and true ideas for success, you can create sub-categories and sub-topics for those opportunities. This, in turn will create even bigger and more advantageous opportunities.

If your career has the potential for external threats, using a mind map will clearly hone in on those threats. You can now see where you need to put your attention to ward off potential outside threats to your career.

As you can see, mind mapping is a very useful tool for assessing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats when it comes to your career.

Do you use Mind Mapping? If so let me know how you use it and how it helps you.

Till next time

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We can also provide training in Mind Mapping.