Navigating Your Next
Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There
Navigating Your Next is a deliberate career guide with advice for assessing one’s current circumstances and desired futures in order to create actionable plans.
Julian Lighton’s systemic career guide Navigating Your Next is for professionals seeking clarity about the direction of their careers.
With practical tools delivered through a workbook-intensive approach, this book introduces a seven-step methodology designed to move professionals from confusion to purposeful action. Across three parts, its diagnostic tool for examining one’s career decisions in terms of competency, context, culture, and mindset is introduced. Drawing on the Japanese concept of ikigai (one’s raison d’être) and adult development theory, this work is about assessing one’s current circumstances and desired future in order to create actionable plans. Each chapter represents a step in the process, with the book progressing from self-assessment through option exploration, value articulation, implementation planning, networking, success measurement, and leadership development.
Functioning as a coached workshop designed for immediate implementation, the book’s progression is deliberate. Its steps include exercises to be completed before advancing, and its resources include appendices with extensive lists of generalist and specialist competencies, values, and motivations. However, the book’s workbook orientation results in some barriers, as it demands significant upfront investment in the form of self-reflection exercises, stakeholder interviews, competency inventories, and network mapping. Those seeking quick guidance or motivational momentum stand to find the pace frustrating. Further, the book’s linear structure, while logical, leaves little room for intuitive or opportunity-based career navigation.
Still, the book’s synthesis of multiple disciplines results in depth without requiring mastery of any single field for navigation. Concepts from neuroscience (amygdala hijacking and confusion), adult development psychology (Frederic Hudson’s life stages), business strategy (competency frameworks), and coaching methodology interconnect throughout. This interdisciplinary weaving results in a robust foundation, though it sometimes leads to uneven terrain. The neuroscience discussions, for instance, feel introductory compared to the sophisticated treatment of competency assessment and value proposition development.
The book excels when translating business frameworks into career tools, as with the STAR method for resume writing, distinctions drawn between generalist and specialist competencies, and coverage of the mechanics of LinkedIn profile optimization. Further, the prose maintains professional clarity without falling into corporate jargon or self-help platitudes. It is direct and coaching oriented, using rhetorical questions to prompt reflection, and its sentences are active and concrete. However, the book’s emphasis on systematic processes sometimes constrains the prose. Extended framework explanations and exercise instructions dominate, leaving limited space for memorable flourishes. Further, the case studies are quite brief and generalized to obscure client specifics, serving more as proof points than compelling stories on their own merit.
Navigating Your Next is a grounded career guide designed to assist those who are committed to methodical self-assessment in the name of professional betterment.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
