Do you know what your career path looks like?

Julia Stones, Executive Search Professional and Career Coach, shares her career journey, the lessons she learnt along the way, and how a powerful career tool can make all the difference.

Research has revealed that 95 per cent of us do not plan our careers strategically unless we have a vocation when there is a clear sense of what, how and why we want to follow a specific career path. The rest of us are opportunistic job seekers who tend to do a rudimentary SWOT analysis about potential roles to ensure the headline areas like role content, money and location resonate. Typically, it seems we don’t usually drill down into more fundamental truths and aspirations so we can really flourish.

If we opt for tertiary study, we often choose our best subject at school and then embark on the next three years without a clear sense of what might happen afterwards.

And that was definitely me.

History was my best subject at school, so I elected to study for a history degree. I then discovered there was a Scandinavian studies department in the same university with a well-known professor as Dean who had written a famous book about Vikings. Having been brought up in the north of Norway, this was of genuine interest to me, so I did a spontaneous about-turn at the end of my first semester and abandoned history in favour of translating medieval Icelandic sagas and studying Scandinavian languages and literature. As part of my degree, I spent a year at the university in my hometown of Tromso. I would like to say ‘studying’, but honestly there wasn’t much of that, because I spent most of the time being a multilingual tour guide for cruise ships to support myself financially. I enjoyed every minute in the Paris of the North, as Tromso is known.

I then moved to London and became a London tour guide because it paid well during the holidays. I also worked part-time for an incoming tour operator, specialising in the United Kingdom.

When I graduated from university, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next. So half-heartedly, I applied to the Foreign Office for a role as a technical translator in Norwegian. The 80-page application form was so daunting I suggested to the boss of the tour operator that he might like to employ me permanently. He was pretty adamant that I wasn’t an attractive proposition, because I had no office skills, but he decided to take a punt on me, provided I took myself off to learn how to touch type. When I reached the dizzying heights of 40 words per minute, he took me on permanently and I found myself working in the job of my dreams: researching, crafting and then marketing tours of the United Kingdom across Scandinavia, France and the United States. I got to use my languages, travel extensively and meet interesting people from all over the world. Sadly, the trade-off was that it paid peanuts, so when looking to secure a mortgage, I answered an advert for “a rewarding career opportunity”, which turned out to be a role in a recruitment consultancy. I had stumbled into my next career.

…it is both a privilege and a responsibility to work with someone during their job search.

The recruitment consultancy I joined was innovative, agile, brave and in growth mode. We flew the plane as we were building it, implementing best practice without even knowing it was. I was appointed a director and shareholder of the London-based business as it grew to become a marketleading group of diversified consultancies over several years.

Our main difference was that we genuinely cared for and looked after our people. We built a great culture and developed a reputation for being first to market in London in our sector. We became an acquisition target for a US-global entity, and I remained with the business for some roller coaster years to take it from being privately owned to being part of a huge enterprise on a global stage. It was an immensely challenging journey but a great learning curve.

If we ever thought something was a good idea, we quickly implemented it. For example, the first Candidate Care Consultant and Candidate Charter in London were created because I wasn’t impressed with the level of candidate care in the recruitment industry. I recognised that it is both a privilege and a responsibility to work with someone during their job search.

This led to the genesis of the Career Blueprint™, a careerscoping tool I designed to help set people up for success in their careers. By investing time to do some really introspective thinking about what is fundamentally important to an individual, the Career Blueprint™ tool creates a powerful and empowering framework to help people have a higher probability of being successful in their career choices. By removing the programmed thinking (which we all have in varying degrees) and listening to their own voices, people can start to discover what really makes them tick.

Each Career Blueprint™ is a voyage of discovery because people are all individuals with widely differing interests and aspirations.

The strategic imperative here is that if you discover what you really want to do and, just as importantly, understand why you want to do it, you are more likely to give the 20 per cent of discretionary effort that no organisation can demand. The knock-on effect is that, if you are engaged and flourishing, the organisation you work with will benefit, too. There’s nothing new here, but it is remarkably difficult to do the reflective thinking without the support of a career coach who can constructively challenge and guide your career thinking and help you identify potential career paths to explore. The Career Blueprint™ can be completed at any stage of a career and, once completed, it has real longevity because fundamental truths like value sets have been identified and captured. These never change, while current career drivers will change as careers evolve and life situations change.

I work with school leavers, university graduates, leaders at the top of their careers as well as people at any stage of a career crossroads to help them understand themselves better, capture their passion and scope potential next career steps. No judgement is attached to a Career Blueprint™, and each one is a voyage of discovery because people are all individuals with widely differing interests and aspirations.

It can be hugely liberating and fulfilling, and, in some cases, life-changing.

In my experience, people don’t generally value a digital career profiling exercise that generates a computer-driven report. They would far rather have an intelligent conversation with someone who genuinely has their best interests at heart and who wants to help them succeed with whatever it is they truly want to do. This can be hugely liberating and fulfilling, and, in some cases, life-changing. I’ve seen time and again that people can relinquish the obligations of programmed thinking to allow themselves to follow their passion if they really want to.

I fell into recruitment all those years ago as an opportunistic job seeker. It took me many years to realise my passion was to help people identify, secure and flourish in their chosen career paths. I got there eventually to become the career coach that I now am, but it was through default rather than design.

If only there had been a Career Blueprint™ for myself, I might have got there more quickly!

For HRNZ members, look out for more information in the coming months about how you can access the Career Blueprint™ tool as a career development tool for your own career pathway.

Julia Stones has over 25 years’ experience as an executive search professional and career coach, leading national and international organisations in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States as director and shareholder. Julia relocated to New Zealand in 2005 and founded Julia Stones and Associates Ltd in 2017, after working for executive search and HR consultancies for several years in Auckland. A voluntary HRNZ Board member for 10 years, Julia was elected as the national Vice President and then President. She was the Board sponsor responsible for designing and implementing Chartered membership and continuing professional development for the HR profession in New Zealand, working with over 100 volunteers and academics across six work streams for two years. She also represented HRNZ as the Director of APFHRM to design and implement a competency framework for HR professionals in Asia Pacific. Julia was awarded Distinguished Fellow of HRNZ in 2020 and the HRNZ Outstanding Service Award in 2024. jsassociates.co.nz