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The Bold and the Better Paid: How To Plan My Career in 2026
- Genesis Career Centre
- Apr 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 16
Why you should get more serious about working toward your career goals.
There’s a reason why the old saying goes “fortune favours the bold”. If you want something, you have to go and get it. This is an attitude we should focus on having through all aspects of our lives.
If you want to eat ice cream at 10:00 PM on a weekday, go have the ice cream.
If you've always wanted to try a new hobby or skill, go ahead and get it done.
If you want something much bigger for your career, go work towards it.
Naturally, this is easier said than done.
It’s so hard to align your reality with your desires; everything—especially in 2026—is actively trying to work against every goal and plan you’ve made. It’s pretty exhausting to fight when you barely have anything in the tank left.
But…
It’s either putting in the work or settling, and you can’t settle.
To do this, you need to align yourself in three ways: your career, your mindset, and your personal life.
Career
Everything in your career is achievable.
It's all about balancing your direction with the freedom to explore different paths, and to do this, you have to work backwards. In today's professional world, as long as you have an end goal, you can hop between industries to collect the skills and experience you need to get there.
My general formula for creating a success path to a career goal is a set of three. It goes like this:
Define the target: Which job postings or titles would match your target career?
Identify the pattern: What are the most common and realistic requirements you see for these job postings?
Commit to growing: Choose the most popular or achievable requirements from that list and try to complete them in order of priority.
And there you go! You've just made the outlines of your career journey with actionable steps you can manage.
Let me show you how it would work:
Meet Vee Escode:
She recently graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science this year and is looking to enter healthcare because she always wanted to work in medicine, but being a doctor never really felt right to her.
She told me she hadn't wanted to go back and earn another degree in the natural sciences or medicine because she couldn't endure another torturous four years so soon (we don't even blame her) and she doesn't have the funding for a master's just yet.
We still wanted to reach her Hannah Montana moment with what she had, so we had to do a little reshaping to align her direction from just "I'm not sure what to do".
We started with DEFINE, specifically, how she saw herself using her degree. We worked out in her session that she really wanted to be in research or work in medical laboratory settings. From this, we found that her target industry is Bioinformatics and we found a few job postings that could put a title to her dream career.
Then we went to IDENTIFY the most common and realistic requirements each job posting had, ordering them based on priority. We marked off any she already had, like proficiency with software languages, and made a list of things she was missing, like experience in R and a medical technician certification.
By the end of our sessions, we decided that she would COMMIT to learning the new programming language and getting certified in statistical analysis, which was necessary for her to get her foot in the door in an entry-level position and work her way up to the amount of relevant experience she needed to complete her certification.
This formula can apply to everyone. Whether you're entering the workforce for the first time, switching fields or trying to enter a more senior position, once you're ready to get serious about your career, it will work for you. In Vee's case, committing to the two requirements helped her pull the gap between her education and field requirements close enough that she was able to score a job as a bioinformatician at a medical centre.
You can try the formula here with our 10-minute worksheet:
Aiming to work on small actionable steps is how you plan your career in 2026, because it makes it so much easier for you to move forward in your career, especially when your mindset is aligned with your plans.
Mindset
“Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you.” - Nedra Glover Tawwab.
This may seem like a superficial step, but realigning your mindset when trying to achieve a goal is actually rooted in psychological reasoning.
It all has to do with neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the ability that allows the brain to change and adapt neural pathways in relation to trauma and treatment.
Pause.
You don't need trauma to use it; it can help you break bad habits by changing how you approach challenges and goals.
Enough with the science lesson; let's get into it.
We're going to focus on giving you new thought patterns to overcome analysis paralysis and, more broadly, anxiety.
2-Minute Mindset Reset:
If you're feeling anxiety when looking at your career:
Stop and label the feeling.
Are you nervous? Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you despondent?
Trace the feeling to its source.
Why are you feeling like this? Is it because you're unsure of what to do? Is it because you don't know where to start?
Do you feel your career path is wrong for you? Do you feel that your dreams are too far away to achieve? Do you feel like you'd rather be doing nothing at all?
Rationalise it.
"I feel like my career path is wrong for me." - Then what feels right?
"Do you feel that your dreams are too far away to achieve?" - Have you checked where you should start?
"Do you feel like you'd rather be doing nothing at all?" - Have you checked where and when this feeling started?
This is just the starting point you need to get started. Once your mindset has been aligned with your goals, you'll be able to accomplish the final piece—your personal life.
Personal Life
Though this section has a lot in common, it really needed its own spotlight because it is so important for making serious progress.
You can prepare yourself mentally to do all the work in the world when it comes to outlining your career path or resetting your mindset, but if your personal life doesn’t have the capacity to support the intensive shift, you’re going to feel it.
Moving too quickly without preparing the environment around you first can cause a huge amount of dissonance and stress, which is normally the cause of people abandoning their journey.
So before you push forward, ask yourself this:
Is my life prepared to take this on right now?
Let's hop back to Vee!
Yes, we list one planning session as the service, but our help never stops there. After we finished off boarding and she got her complete plan, we did our 12-week check-in to see how much progress she's made.
It wasn't much.
Not because she didn’t try—honestly, she exceeded expectations with how much she did in a short period—but because she took on so much at once that her life just got too heavy to actually make long-term progress.
Right after our service, she joined a graduate course for data analysis and a certificate in DNA sequencing; she joined a non-profit as a virtual data assistant, and she started working on her own personal project to display in her portfolio.
A+ for effort, but the timing wasn't great.
She was already working full-time, and her company suddenly requested she take on 12-hour and weekend shifts, taking up the time she would have used to attend her lectures and complete volunteer work.
Vee had burnt out so quickly in those 3 months that she failed a few assignments for her courses and hadn't responded to her volunteer supervisor's emails in weeks.
We knew how badly she wanted to achieve her dreams, but stability comes first, so we called her in to see how we can help, starting by asking the same question:
Are you ready for what this actually requires?
It hurts at first to hear that you aren't prepared enough to achieve your dreams, but it was so important that we had Vee face her reality.
Going after what she needed to make the switch to bioinformatics, especially at the research level, was going to take a lot of time and energy. It was better that she was honest about what it was costing her to see how much she could afford to give at that moment.
There’s a line between your dreams and your reality. Doesn't mean you should give up; it really just means that your personal life needs to be more aligned with your career goals and your mindset.
We then spent an afternoon working through her life and how we could make some changes to her workload. Vee got the courage—after a bit of scolding from us—to reach out to her volunteer supervisor and explain her situation so she could cut back on her hours. She did the same with her course instructors and school administration, asking for clarification on where she was in the course and what flexibility she had in the future. Once that was done, we helped her plan a work schedule to balance her commitments after her rough period at work passed.
Now she's on track to finishing her certificate this year (Go Vee!), and she has strong references to use from her volunteer position when she's ready to apply for a new job.
It's amazing what you can accomplish once you're completely aligned.
To the ones who wish to be bold and better-paid,
This is what it means to be serious about your career.
It's more than just wanting better for yourself; like everything else in life, you have to be willing to face the changes and growing pains that come along with it.
Aligning your career plans, mindset and personal life is a great step in the right direction because it will encourage you to keep making strides regardless of what challenges you face on the way.
So, go be bold and start taking your career more seriously.
If you’d like support in planning your career, book our career coaching service:
or chat with us on a free guidance call to see how we can support you:
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