Design: Professional Non Negotiables
THE CAREER PSYCHOLOGIST X DIAGEO · THE OWN YOUR CAREER SERIES
Design - How do Design Career Progression
Welcome to Week 2 of the Career Ownership Podcast Series with The Career Psychologist x Diageo.
In our live session and in Podcast 1, we considered goal-setting in the broader context of your life. We explored the conditions that hold ambition and used your Physical and Personal Non-Negotiables to examine how professionally sustainable goals are designed.
This week, we step directly into the professional layer and anchor our attention to one central question:
What do I want professionally during this season of life, and why?
Professional ambition does not remain static across a career. It shifts in emphasis and changes shape as it evolves in response to both opportunity and circumstance. Yet when setting professional goals, many of us default to progression-based outcomes, a particular role, a specific title, without explicitly examining what that progression actually represents.
To bring greater precision to your ambition, we use three lenses to consider your professional goals: Growth, Development, and Progression.
These are not levels, nor are they linear stages. They represent structural distinctions that help you understand the shape of your ambition and determine the goals required to get there.
- Growth is experiential. It expands your range through stretch assignments, exposure to complexity, and increased responsibility.
- Development is capability-based. It deepens or broadens skill, refines judgement, and strengthens technical or strategic competence.
- Progression is structural. It formalises your contribution through role, title, scope, or accountability.
Across your career, you will move within, between, and across all three. Sometimes one is foregrounded, while at other times they operate together.
In many cases, progression is the visible outcome of prior development and growth. A new role often rests on capabilities already deepened and experience already expanded. At other times, stepping into progression reveals the need for further development. Growth can create exposure that makes progression possible. Development can strengthen credibility that accelerates growth.
There is no straight line here. This process is cyclical, layered, and iterative.
The work this week is not to “pick one”, rather it is to identify which lens requires deliberate emphasis now, and how the others underpin that goal.
There are seasons where progression is energising and appropriate. There are seasons where development is the wiser move. And there are seasons where growth through stretch experience is exactly what is required to prepare for what comes next.
When you view your Professional Non-Negotiables through these lenses, goal setting becomes intentional and deliberate.
Instead of asking, “What should I aim for next?” you ask,
Is my focus primarily a Growth? If so, what experience do I need to gain?
Is Development the foundation of what next? If so, which capability requires focused attention?
Is Progression my focus? If so, what evidence, visibility, and positioning must I intentionally design?
Once you understand the interplay, professional ambition moves from vague aspiration to structural design.
When you design your professional goals in this way, you simultaneously build your career capital and widen your zone of influence, which is our focus in Podcast Week 3.
In Week 4, we integrate everything into a sustainable rhythm, a weekly structure that ensures your professional ambition continues to sit inside the wider conditions you defined in Week 1.
Looking forward to seeing you next week,
