A Professional Roadmap: the secret to reaching your career goals
Debbie Morrison • November 4, 2020

A Professional Roadmap: the secret to reaching your career goals


Every time you hop in the car you have a destination in mind, right? While it’s pretty logical that you need to know where you’re going in order to get there, many of us overlook the same approach when it comes to our careers and reaching our professional goals. 


Just like driving, knowing your destination guides pretty much all of your decisions – from planning the best route, knowing how much time you’ll need and even making sure you have enough petrol (and snacks) to last the journey. Without some kind of roadmap – be it formal or informal – you may end up ‘lost on the roadside’ wondering where on earth you are and how on earth you got there!


Here are some of the key things we suggest every employee keeps in mind when formulating their own professional roadmap:


1. Define your career goals . Start by defining what that ‘success’ actually looks like for you. What are you trying to achieve and, perhaps more importantly, why? Business success? Career progression? More money? More time with your family and friends? Whatever it is and whatever your motivations, be as specific and measurable as possible. By all means have an end destination in mind, but also outline some of the key professional milestones along the way – say, every 12 months – and ideally include a time-frame as this will help to steer many of your future decisions.


2. Make your goals attainable. It’s essential your goals are obtainable, both in terms of what you want to achieve and also how long you give yourself to do it. By all means you should try to stretch yourself. But if your objectives are simply too hard to achieve, your motivation levels can quickly wane. Experience shows us time and again that unrealistic professional goals are a recipe for disappointment.


3. Make your goals visible. Large or small, professional goals can be hugely motivating, so don’t hide them away! Pin them to your desktop, your office wall, stick them on your fridge at home, set yourself weekly reminders on your smartphone. Keep them top of mind and you’ll stay a lot more focused.

 

4. Identify obstacles. Removing potential barriers, or finding detours around them, is another key strategy on your success journey. What’s held you back professionally in the past? External influences? Bad habits? Unhelpful attitudes? Skillset gaps? Don’t let history repeat itself. Put plans in place to prevent things that may have hindered your career progress in the past.


5. Share the load. You might think the best way to achieve your professional goals is on your own. It makes sense in theory. But, in reality, many people find sharing their goals is hugely helpful. Do you have a workplace mentor or respected colleague you can use as a sounding board from time to time? Even if there isn’t someone you can work with directly, at least tell a few close friends who can provide you with motivation and encouragement along the way. Making them aware of your career goals will also help to keep you more accountable – a good thing!


6. Be persistent. Regardless of how well you perform each of the above steps, there will inevitably still be setbacks and unexpected detours on your professional journey. The important thing is – don’t give up. Learn from your setbacks and mistakes, recalibrate and even change routes if you need to, but keep moving forward. Professional success is rarely easy or straight forward, but it’s certainly worth it.


Contact ELR Executive for information on how we can assist you in your career success.


By John Elliott June 26, 2025
You don’t hear about it on the nightly news. There’s no breaking story. No panic. No protests. Just rows of vegetables being pulled out of the ground with no plan to replant. Just farmers who no longer believe there’s a future for them here. Just quiet decisions — to sell, to walk away, to stop. And if you ask around the industry, they’ll tell you the same thing: It’s not just one bad season. It’s a slow death by a thousand margins. 1 in 3 growers are preparing to leaveIn September 2024, AUSVEG released a national sentiment report with a statistic that should have set off alarms in every capital city: 34% of Australian vegetable growers were considering exiting the industry in the next 12 months. Another one-third said they’d leave if offered a fair price for their farm. Source: AUSVEG Industry Sentiment Report 2024 (PDF) These aren’t abstract hypotheticals. These are real decisions, already in motion. For many, it’s not about profitability anymore, it’s about survival. This isn’t burnout. It’s entrapment. Behind the numbers are people whose entire identity is tied to a profession that no longer feeds them. Many are asset-rich but cash-poor. They own the land. But the land owns them back. Selling means walking away from decades of history. Staying means bleeding capital, month by month, in a system where working harder delivers less. Every year, input costs rise, fuel, fertiliser, compliance. But the farmgate price doesn’t move. Or worse, it drops. Retail World Magazine reports that even though national vegetable production increased 3% in 2023–24, the total farmgate value fell by $140 million. Growers produced more and earned less. That’s not a market. That’s a trap. What no one wants to say aloud The truth is this: many growers are only staying because they can’t leave. If you’re deep in debt, if your farm is tied to multi-generational ownership, if you’ve invested everything in equipment, infrastructure, or land access, walking away isn’t easy. It’s a last resort. So instead, you stay. You cut your hours. Delay maintenance. Avoid upgrades. Cancel the next round of planting. You wait for something to shift, interest rates, weather, prices and you pretend that waiting is strategy. According to the latest fruitnet.com survey, over 50% of vegetable growers say they’re financially worse off than a year ago. And nearly 40% expect conditions to deteriorate further. This isn’t about optimism or resilience. It’s about dignity and the quiet erosion of it. Supermarkets won’t save them, and they never planned to In the current model, supermarket pricing doesn’t reflect real-world farm economics. Retailers demand year-round consistency, aesthetic perfection, and lower prices. They don’t absorb rising input costs, they externalise them. They offer promotions funded not by their marketing budgets, but by the growers’ margins. Farmers take the risk. Retailers take the profit. And because the power imbalance is so deeply entrenched, there’s no real negotiation, just quiet coercion dressed up as "category planning." Let’s talk about what’s actually broken This isn’t just a market failure. It’s a policy failure. Australia’s horticulture system has been built on: Decades of deregulated wholesale markets Lack of collective bargaining power for growers Retailer consolidation that has created a virtual duopoly Export-focused incentives that bypass smaller domestic producers There’s no meaningful floor price for key produce lines. No national enforcement of fair dealing. No public database that links supermarket shelf price to farmgate return. Which means growers, like James, can be driven into loss-making supply contracts without ever seeing the true economics of their product downstream. But the real silence? It’s from consumers. Here’s what no one wants to admit: We say we care about “buying local.” We say we value the farmer’s role. We share those viral posts about strawberries going unsold or milk prices being unfair. And then we complain about a $4 lettuce. We opt for the cheapest bag of carrots. We walk past the "imperfect" produce bin. We frown at the cost of organic and click “Add to Cart” on whatever’s half price. We’re not just bystanders. We’re part of the equation. What happens when the growers go? At first, very little. Supermarkets will find substitutes. Importers will fill gaps. Large agribusinesses will expand into spaces vacated by smaller players. Prices will stay low, until they don’t. But over time, we’ll notice: Produce that travels further and lasts less. Fewer independent growers at farmer’s markets. Entire regions losing their growing identity. National food security becoming a campaign promise instead of a reality. And when the climate throws something serious at us, drought, flood, global supply shock, we’ll realise how little resilience we’ve preserved. So what do we do? We start by telling the truth. Australia is not food secure. Not if 1 in 3 growers are planning to exit. The market isn’t working. Not when prices rise at the shelf and fall at the farmgate. The solution isn’t scale. It’s fairness, visibility, and rebalancing power. That means: Mandating cost-reflective contracts between retailers and suppliers Enabling collective bargaining rights for growers Building transparent data systems linking production costs to consumer prices Introducing transition finance for smaller producers navigating reform and climate pressure And holding supermarkets publicly accountable for margin extraction But more than anything, it means recognising what we’re losing, before it's gone. Final word If you ate a vegetable today, it likely came from someone who’s considered giving up in the past year. Not because they don’t care. But because caring doesn’t pay. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about sovereignty, over what we eat, how we grow it, and who gets to stay in the system.  Because the next time you see rows of green stretching to the horizon, you might want to ask: How many of these fields are already planning their last harvest?
By John Elliott June 20, 2025
If you're leading an FMCG or food manufacturing business right now, you're probably still talking about growth. Your board might be chasing headcount approvals. Your marketing team’s pitching a new brand campaign. Your category team’s assuming spend will bounce. But your customer? They’ve already moved on. Quietly. Like they always do. The illusion of resilience FMCG has always felt protected, “essential” by nature. People still eat, wash, shop. It’s easy to assume downturns pass around us, not through us. But this isn’t 2020. Recessions in 2025 won’t look like lockdowns. They’ll look like volume drops that no promo can fix. Shrinking margins on products that no longer carry their premium. Quiet shelf deletions you weren’t warned about. The data’s already there. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, consumer spending is slowing in real terms , even as inflation eases. The Reserve Bank confirmed in May: household consumption remains subdued amid weak real income growth . And over 80% of Australians have cut back on discretionary food spending , according to Finder. They’re still shopping, just not like they used to. A managing director at a national food manufacturer told me recently: “We won a new product listing in April. By July, it was marked for deletion. The velocity wasn’t there, but neither was the shopper. We’d forecasted like 2022 never ended. Rookie mistake.” That one stuck with me. Because I’ve heard it before, just in different words.