The End-of-Year Career Audit: Looking Back to Move Forward

Episode 11: Before you set new career goals for the new year, it can be helpful to take the time to look back to help you move forwards. In this practical and reflective episode, I explain why reviewing your past year at work is so useful.

Join me, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens, as I  walk you through a step-by-step Career Audit, complete with guided questions to help you assess your wins, lessons, and next steps. Whether you’re considering a full career change or simply want to feel more aligned in your current role, this episode will help you gain insight, direction, and renewed motivation.

✨ You’ll learn:

• Why self-reflection is your most powerful career planning tool
  
  
• How to identify what truly worked (and what didn’t) in your career this year
  
  
• The simple questions that reveal your next right move

🎧 Tune in now and give yourself the clarity you need to make the year ahead your most intentional yet.

In this week’s episode, I am also inviting you to join me live for a brand new masterclass for 2026 on Monday 12th January at 7.30pm. In  ‘From Stuck to Sure: Making Confident Career Change Decisions in 2026’  I’ll be sharing how you can figure out what to do next in your career. What will make decisions not only feel easier but be in alignment with how you really want to be living and working in the future. You are going to find it so valuable and I’ll be doing a live Q&A where you can ask me any questions that you have about the process. To sign up for your free place just click here: danastevens.com/decide2026

Let’s let’s make this next year the one where you really start making the changes you really want.

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/
Free Coaching Consultation: https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free clarity call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

Hello, how are you? How was your Christmas? If you’re listening to this in real time, as it’s released then this is going out at the end of December or you might be listening in the very early days of 2026 so in that case Happy New Year. of course this will still be valuable - if you’re listening at another time in the future and you want to gain some clarity. But the end of one year and beginning of another is traditionally a time when we tend to get reflective and start thinking about the past year and the one ahead I thought it would be helpful if I created a podcast to help you look back at your career with the very particular aim of using that to fuel some thoughts about what you want next in your working life and changes you might want to start making. So if you’ve been feeling stuck, unfulfilled or unsure about your next career move, we’re going to be looking back to help you move forward. 

And if this episode sparks something for you, I’ll be sharing more details at the end about a live masterclass I’m hosting on Monday 12th January at the end, it will help you turn this reflection into real decisions — more on that later.”

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I want to firstly address why it can be so helpful to pause and take time to do a Career audit, a career review. So many people actually rush into setting new goals or targets for themselves - especially at the beginning of the year. However, if you’re doing that without a clear understanding of what is actually working and what’s not working in your career it can be easy to set goals that feel wrong, misaligned or are just based on what you think you should be doing rather than what YOU actually want or need. By taking this time to explore and reflect you can actually feel much clearer and that in turn will help you feel more confident about identifying changes.

AUDIT

I’m going to offer you some questions that you can ask yourself so that you have a framework for your career audit. Now you can use these however you want. Some people just like to think about questions I offer - that’s fine. You can pause after each one I give you and think about your answer. Or just absorb them and think about them later. I know other people love writing things down so you can do that if it works best for you. Just know there is no right or wrong way of doing this.

If you’re listening to me, there’s a high chance that you do want to make some changes to your career. And when you do, it can be easy to tell yourself that nothing is working at the moment or to get stuck in negative cycles about how awful everything is. This is why, very deliberately, I want you to start with what IS WORKING?

1 .>> What has gone well in your job or career this year? This doesn’t have to be a big external milestone like a promotion - you might have made a lovely connection with a colleague at work, or have really enjoyed learning a new skill or a new piece of software.

What did you enjoy?

What gave you energy?

Where did you surprise yourself?

Where did you improve or get better at something?

What are you proud of?

Don’t skip this part. If you are feeling particularly negative about your job, your brain might be flooding you with all the things that went wrong, that aren’t working - and we will get to that. It’s actually a good practice to try and quieten those voices and really dig deep if you need to to find some things to acknowledge that did work out. It might even be that you stayed at your job - even though you didn’t want to - but that you knew you needed to stay financially and you found a way to stick it out a bit longer because that’s the right thing for you at the moment. 

So no skipping this part - try and write down at least 3 things. And if you can make a lovely long list, that’s great.

2. >>So now, you can start thinking about what’s not been working in 2025? What hasn’t gone so well in your role this past year? This might be a challenge or a change that has led to you questioning things.

What has drained you?

What no longer feels meaningful or sustainable?

It could be easy here to start listing out a whole hit list of particular people that have annoyed you or minor grievances so I’d just like to offer that it can be useful to try and focus on things that can be changed.

So by all means you can list things out if it feels cathartic - if it helps you process the year - but try and sum it up with what that means for you. For example if you’re thinking my manager is really mean - you could list all the mean things she did if you would find it helpful - or you could decide to instead focus on what that really means to you. Does having a mean manager translate to a lack of opportunity for promotion in your team? 

Or your organisation might have faced 3 rounds of redundancies in 2025 - each making you feel more unsettled and more undervalued than the last. Maybe this means that you no longer think that your organisation is where you will thrive in 2026

Hopefully you can see that what we’re looking for is not just what isn’t working but what that really means for you personally.

3. >> This leads us on to thinking about the third area of your Career Audit, what do you want more or less of next year?

This could be in the very specific work sense, like do you want to lead more meetings? Do you want more input in projects further upstream? Do you want more training on a specific area? Do you want more recognition for the work you’re already doing

More broadly this could be about whether you want more work life balance or flexibility?

Do you want more money? A promotion, a bigger team or more say in the direction of your team or business?

Do you want less responsibilities? Do you want less drama? Do you want less uncertainty?

Out of things that you come up with. What are the 3 main areas that you want to tackle?

What are your key priorities for change in the next year?

Now I don’t want you to get stuck in the HOW at this point. Don’t worry yet about how you are going to achieve the changes, the first step is to identify the changes that you do want and need now and in this next chapter of your working life.

This isn’t about having all the answers, just come up with some theories - a hypothesis for the changes you think are really going to help you. 

4. >> And finally, what else do you think you need to learn or explore?

If you’re not sure what changes you do want, what questions do you need to answer? Even that can be a great place to start.

What areas are you curious about? What would you like to think more about?

So remember the point of this audit is not to have all the answers but it’s to give yourself time, space - permission to start reflecting. To start building up your awareness of what has been happening so far, of where you are now in your career, of what areas you thnk you might want to change.

At this stage it’s enough to start seeing patterns and identifying possibilities.

Rather than trying to rush forward and make changes in a panic, clarity can come from take your time and reflecting.

If you know that 2026 is the year that you do want to make changes to your career, and therefore your life, and today’s episode helped you start thinking about what’s next, my upcoming free,  live masterclass session will help show you how to turn some of those insights into action. 

It will be on Monday 12th January at 7pm, it’s brand new and called  ‘From Stuck to Sure: Making Confident Career Change Decisions in 2026’. And I’ll be sharing how you can figure out what to do next in your career. What will make decisions not only feel easier but be in alignment with how you really want to be living and working in the future. You are going to find it so valuable and I’ll be doing a live Q&A where you can ask me any questions that you have about the process. I will put the link to sign up in the show notes or you can go to my website - that’s danastevens.com/decide2026 - that’s dana <SPELL> Stevens forward slash decide 2026. So don’t waste another year stuck in a job that no longer works for you, let’s make this next year the one where you really start making the changes you really want.

I can’t wait to see you there.

Bye for now