BBU Career Design Canvas, free download
Our mission is to help create a diverse, thriving, productive sector where everybody has the chance to shine. We've designed our unique Career Design Canvas to help you make the right choices and drive your career forward. For more information on the Canvas and how to use it see the article below.
BBU founder Danna Walker explores how the Canvas could help you to achieve your career goals.
What is the Built By Us careers canvas?
Our Careers Design Canvas is a tool designed to capture the key information about you and your career, helping you reflect on your journey so far and possible next steps. This leads to the development of an outstanding CV and, most importantly, exploring potential future plans.
Why did you decide to create it?
I really like the style of the tool which I had come across when developing Built By Us – the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. One of the most daunting undertakings for many business owners is writing a business plan. I discovered the Business Model Canvas on an entrepreneurial incubator course and thought it was fantastic a real game changer.
The Business Model Canvas allowed you to think quickly, creatively and visually about the challenges and opportunities while helping to identify key needs and understand where to access potential resources! After finding the process so useful, I felt that it could be developed for people who want to think through the next steps of their career.
How does it work?
The Career Design Canvas is a one-page tool, so it's easily downloadable and replicated. The page features 11 boxes each containing questions starting with:
"Where are you now? How would you describe your career currently? How satisfied are you with your current situation?"
"Where do you want to be? What does an ideal future look like for you?"
"Where are your passions? What values and interests that you could bring to your ideal role?"
Unlike a CV or bio, it captures your past, present and potential future, all on a single page. If you can, I'd recommend printing it a large scale and using post-it notes so that you can continue to change and add to your canvas.
What do I get out of the Canvas?
The Canvas is a dynamic, live and visual document that you can and should revisit regularly. It's particularly useful to sit down and complete the canvas at key career stages and life changes – think of this as a self-diagnostic tool to make sure you’re on the right path.
It has been working really well with the participants in all our programmes, especially the FLUID Diversity Mentoring Programme which was designed to support careers and leadership development.
Mentors and mentees often use it as a way of driving their conversations helping mentees to identify and understand the resources they currently have while setting goals and direction where needed.
The Career Design Canvas is adapted from The Business Model Canvas (businessmodelgeneration.com) designed by Built By Us is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License