So It’s important to take a step back and think strategically so you spend the next several years building your career in the direction you want it to go (and not languishing in place or accidentally taking a tempting-but-ultimately unhelpful detour).

There are three questions I make my coaching clients answer anytime they’re starting a job search or accepting an offer to help them keep their long-term strategic goals front-and-centre:

#1 - How Will This Job Set You Up For Your Next Role?

When you’re in the middle of a job search, it’s easy to target roles that are an obvious fit and an easy yes (especially when the economy is, as the youths would say, sus).

And it makes sense, right? The easiest job you’ll ever land is one where you already have 90% or more of the skills.

But before you sign on the dotted line, I want you to think about what your next job search or promotion conversation is going to look like.

A few years from now you’ll be back here, bored out of your skull from doing the same ‘ol same ‘ol and looking for your next challenge. How will this job have helped you?

And there’s nothing better than direct proof in the form of results to convince a hiring manager that you’re the one for the job.

So what results will this job set you up to show off in your next job search?

Is this the kind of job that will give you lots of low-hanging fruit with easily quantifiable metrics you can lovingly highlight in bold on your resume? Or is this the kind of job that is a slow build with end results that are mostly hard-to-quantify vibes?

Both of these are great achievements, but Improved team culture and effectiveness is hard to quantify and substantiate – so it’s harder to make them sound wow on resumes and in interviews. But if you get a job where you can create results that speak for themselves – like increased business unit profitability by 15% – you’ll be guaranteed to raise eyebrows in your next job search.

So before you accept that job offer sitting in your inbox – or even better, before you submit your resume for that job that popped up on LinkedIn – think about whether the role will help you fill your resume with easily-quantifiable wins.

#3 - What Story Will This Job Help Your Resume Tell?

When a recruiter or hiring manager reads your resume, they’re concocting a story about you in their head. And since everything they know about you is contained in that one to two page PDF resume you sent them, they build a narrative about what you have to offer based entirely off of what’s written on the page. So you need to make sure that your resume tells a story that matches what they’re looking for.

Early in my career as a Mining Engineer, I spent four years working as a consultant at a mining software company. It was a great company and I absolutely loved the work, but I knew that I had to be cautious about the story it created on my resume. Because I was working for a supplier rather than directly for a mine or traditional engineering consultancy, I knew there was a risk that my job wouldn’t be viewed as technical enough. Simply put, the industry didn’t view the work I was doing as “real” mining engineering.

What would have happened if I had followed my software consulting job with….yet another software consulting job? Or if I had moved to working for a supplier in another vertical, like Caterpillar or Komatsu? My resume would’ve told hiring managers that I had a lot of sales, implementation, and consulting skills, but it wouldn’t have created a narrative that I know how to deal with the day-to-day issues of running a mine.

If I wanted to keep building my expertise in mine planning, I knew that my next role needed to be on a mine site, or my resume would handcuff me and make a path back to those kinds of technical roles increasingly difficult.

Whether you’ve got an offer in front of you or you’re just starting a new job search, it’s time to take a careful look at your future resume. When you add this experience onto your resume and a recruiter reads it a few years down the line, what story will they make up about you?