Two foundations, five stages. Not a pipeline. The two foundations run continuously underneath everything. The five stages have a natural order when pursuing any single opportunity, but across a career they cycle and overlap — you’re often working on several at once.
Grounded in established research. The model adapts and simplifies three well-affirmed academic frameworks: Van Hooft, Wanberg & Van Hoye (2013) on the four-phase self-regulatory job search cycle; Savickas (2012) on career adaptability resources (the 4Cs: concern, control, curiosity, confidence); and Wilhelm et al. (2024) on the multidimensional structure of career self-management behaviours. The intent is to keep the rigour of these frameworks while making them recognisable and actionable for someone working in international development and humanitarian careers.
The two foundations (continuous, underneath all stages)
1. Mindset — Am I in the right state to navigate? Your motivation, resilience, agency, ability to manage the emotional cost of uncertainty, rejection, and pressure. Whether you act from initiative or from inertia. How you handle setbacks. The internal conditions that determine whether you can act on anything else in the model. Key questions: What keeps me going? What gets in my way internally? How do I respond to rejection or stagnation? Am I acting or avoiding? Established roots: Savickas’s 4Cs (concern, control, curiosity, confidence); job search self-regulation literature.
2. Capability — What can I actually do, and what am I building? Your current skills, your skill gaps relative to where you want to go, and your active investment in closing those gaps. Not just what you have; what you are growing into. Key questions: What do I actually know how to do? What’s becoming obsolete? What am I learning, and how? Am I building the skills that match where I want to go? Established roots: Career self-management literature (human capital development); skills-based hiring research.
The five stages (cyclical, with a natural order per opportunity)
3. Direction — Where am I aiming? Your career narrative, identity, target roles, sectors, organisations. The hypothesis you’re testing about where you fit and where you want to go. Not a fixed plan — a working compass that you revise as you learn more. Key questions: What am I aiming for next? Why this and not something else? Has my picture shifted, and what shifted it?
4. Presence — How do I show up? The artefacts and signals that represent you to others. CV, LinkedIn, portfolio, references, written and spoken self-presentation, the consistency between them. Key questions: When was the last time I updated my materials? Do they actually represent who I am now and where I’m going? What signals am I sending — intentionally and unintentionally?
5. Visibility — What do I see? Your awareness of what’s out there. Job boards, alerts, sector intelligence, networks, informational conversations, market trends. Whether opportunities relevant to you are reaching you at all. Key questions: Do I see the opportunities that fit me? Am I casting wide or going deep? Where do I actually find the roles worth knowing about?
6. Choice — What do I go after? Filtering and prioritising what’s worth your effort. Relevance fit, desirability, effort-cost, strategic fit. Converting a large opportunity set into a small investment set. Key questions: How do I decide what to apply to? What signals matter most? Am I making informed choices or guessing?
7. Pursuit — How do I convert? The work of actually applying, tailoring, interviewing, negotiating, closing. The mechanics from “I’ve decided to go for this” to outcome. Key questions: When I want a role, what do I actually do? Where does it get hard? What works, what falls apart?
Why this shape
Why two foundations. Both Mindset and Capability run continuously and act as conditions for everything else. You can have a sharp Direction and tailored Presence, but if your Mindset is depleted or your Capability is misaligned with where you’re aiming, the rest doesn’t move. The IACW 2026 programme confirms this empirically — roughly a quarter of sessions are about inner state (Saboteurs, Adaptability Quotient, Thriving in Uncertainty, Inner Resilience, Habits under Pressure, Strengths) and a meaningful fraction about skills (Upskilling, Skills Shift, Behavioural Science).
Why five outer stages and not a linear pipeline. Within a single application episode there’s a natural order — Direction precedes Choice precedes Pursuit. But across a career, all five run in parallel: you’re working on Presence while pursuing one role, while still scanning Visibility for the next, while reconsidering Direction based on feedback from the last cycle. Calling them “stages” rather than “steps” preserves the order without forcing linearity.
Where Feedback fits. Not as a separate layer. Feedback runs through everything: a rejection updates Direction; an interview updates Presence; a market signal updates Visibility. Treating Feedback as a stage encourages people to think of it as a sixth thing to do, when in practice it’s a property of how the rest of the model is used over time.