Hopefully, by this stage, you’ve nailed the tricky part and you now have a clearer idea of your vision, mission and values.

It’s now time to get to work!

A smart way of growing your career (during the early years of your career at least) is to keep your options open between the 3 different career routes.

These include:

1. climbing the corporate ladder
2. developing your own product based business (this usually tends to be a B2C business model)
3. and freelancing, by setting up your own service based business (this usually tends to be a B2B business model).

Regardless of which one you choose to focus on the thing that glues these routes together, and brings harmony to your career, is the industry that you want to specialise in.

There are a few benefits of focusing your career within a specific industry.

The first benefit is that it will help speed up your professional development and your journey up the corporate ladder to your dream job.

The common strategy when job hunting is to search according to your desired job role regardless of what industry you end up in.

However, we’d encourage you to go against this urge, and instead focus primarily on understanding your industry and refocusing your job search by prioritising that. 

At the beginning, this approach will feel slower and almost counter intuitive, but over the course of time, as your industry knowledge and contacts grow, you’ll find that your career evolution will eventually gather pace far quicker than if you opt to instead jump from one industry to another.

Of course building up experience in your job role is important. But this experience can be built up faster than you think. But when you’re able to position yourself as an industry expert and demonstrate a wealth of industry contacts in addition to your job experience you’ll be putting yourself in a far stronger position.

Essentially this is the secret to super charging your career, is to build your industry knowledge and network.

Secondly, another benefit of focusing your career on one industry is it will also mean you’ll more than likely find a company culture that best fits your working identity.

Research studies have shown that employees are more likely to stay with a company where they feel their contributions add value to the company’s overall mission, rather than simply if they only identify with the job role at hand.

Being able to contribute to a company's mission that aligns with your purpose and vision will give your job much more meaning, and you’ll be far more likely to be happier at work.

Last but not least, by focusing on a specific industry, and becoming an industry expert, and then growing a relevant network, are all key ingredients to becoming a successful solopreneur and developing your product and marketing.

We’ll be discussing this in more detail later in the course.

The tricky part can be knowing which industry you should be focusing on.

This usually depends on how specific your niche was when you created your initial vision.

What you may find is that if you don’t have a specific niche, is that your mission will then fall under the scope of multiple industries. 

For example, let’s say your vision is to help people with mindfulness by running an online course. What industry would that fall under?

At first glance this would most likely fall under the B2C ‘self-help’ industry.

However, as a part of your business model you may want to partner with schools and businesses to help bring mindfulness into those institutions. 

So this would now mean that ‘education’, and ‘HR’ would become additional industries that fall under your scope.

You may also find that there are several charities that work in this niche too, so that would be another industry that falls under your scope.

So in this example, we’ve already identified at least four industries that relate to your vision.

Using Exercise File 5 you’re now going to try and identify what industries relate to your vision.

The best way to do this is to look at your core values as we’ve discussed already.

Typically, the best way to identify your values is to think to yourself what hot topics do you want to be known as a thought leader within? 

For example, here at Rocket our core values include:

1. Living with purpose
2. Wellbeing
3. Professional development
4. And solopreneurship

We therefore want to be associating ourselves with industries that match those values. So in this example, what we’ve found is that the following industries match up with these values.

So when it comes to our first value, living with purpose, we’ve identified that the education sector, philosophy groups and career consultants as suitable industries that match that value.

When it comes to our second value, wellbeing, we’ve identified wellbeing charities and wellbeing consultants as a relevant match.

Thirdly, we’ve identified that the recruitment industry matches up with our value of professional development.

And finally we’ve identified business and marketing consultants as a good industry match for our final value of solopreneurship.

We’d encourage you to now use Exercise File 5 to start identifying what industries fall under your career scope. We’ll be analysing those industries in a bit more detail later, but for now it’s good to just become aware of what they are.

It’s important to also mention that the more specific you can be with your industries the better. So for example, you may think you’re targeting the education industry, however more specifically you may actually be targeting career advice departments within the education industry. This way you’ll be forming a more focused niche for yourself.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that for this exercise there’s no need to stress if it’s not all 100% immediately obvious what industry or industries align with your purpose. This may very well be an exercise you come back to later after doing your industry research.