Elaine Welteroth’s Tips for Creating a Career Blueprint

Elaine Welteroth is an award-winning journalist, New York Times–bestselling author, and television host.

Elaine began her career at Ebony and Glamour before making history at Teen Vogue as the publication's first Black Editor in Chief. After leaving women’s magazines, Elaine went on to other highly visible positions in television, including serving as a judge on Project Runway.

In less than 15 years, Elaine Welteroth has stepped into more career roles and garnered more professional accolades than many people do in a lifetime. All along, her career blueprint, which she describes as her “North Star,” has guided her.

A career blueprint is a 30,000-foot view of your career path. “[Your career blueprint] should give you a sense of what the arc is that you want your career to take,” Elaine says. “It should encompass your short-term goals, as well as your long game plan… Once you have a sense of where you’re headed, you can really start to focus your attention on taking the first step in that direction.”

Creating a career blueprint can help you advance in your current position, gain clarity about a new career path, or push yourself outside of your comfort zone. To design your career action plan, Elaine suggests identifying your zone of genius, picking a lane, and making your mind map.

Your “zone of genius” is what sets you apart, or as Elaine explains it, “that sweet spot at the intersection of your passions, your talents, your skills, and your values. I define your zone of genius as that which only you can do like nobody else. It’s almost as unique to you as your fingerprint. And I try to spend as much time as I can in my life operating from there.”

To uncover your zone of genius, reflect on your passion, skills, talent, and value.

• Passion: This is what you’d pursue if money or time weren’t concerns. If you cannot easily identify your passion, you should aim to find what you enjoy—even if the answer doesn’t come easily. “It takes time to cultivate that and it takes encouragement,” Elaine says. “But the goal is for you to become a little bit more driven by what actually makes you feel good and what actually lights you up inside.”
• Skills: Even if the course of your career has not panned out as you expected, you have learned new skills along the way, and they can get you closer to your career goals. “Everything that we have cultivated along the way, every tool that we’ve picked up along the way and put in our toolkit is gonna come in handy on the road ahead,” Elaine says.
• Talent: These are things that come naturally to you, which can make identifying your talents hard to gauge. If you’re having trouble with this task, tap your network. Elaine suggests asking them to make a list of the areas in which you excel. “I guarantee you it will be like somebody is holding up a mirror to all the gifts and talents that you’ve been taking for granted all along,” she says.
• Values: According to Elaine, you can find your values by asking yourself what matters more to you than money and why. This will help you decide whether an opportunity, like a new job, makes sense for you. “If it negates your values system and goes against what you stand for and what you believe, I would really take a long pause and look in the mirror before you move forward with that decision,” Elaine says. “The reason why you’ve outlined what your values are is so that they become a filter when you’re making hard decisions.”

The next step of your career blueprint is picking a lane—that is, spaces that speak to you. When Elaine looked at the career of her mentor, magazine editor and writer Harriette Cole, she identified several lanes that Cole ran in: magazines, books, radio, TV, and consulting, among others. This helped Elaine realize that she wanted to work at the intersection of fashion, journalism, and activism.

As you start thinking about your long-term career goals, jot down a list of all of the lanes you want to explore. If you have trouble coming up with the various industries or spaces, take a cue from Elaine and think about people whose careers you admire. See if you can break down their lives and careers into different lanes, and then use that list as a jumping-off point for yourself.

While picking a lane may limit you to a few fields, this process isn’t permanent, as Elaine notes. “It is never too late to pivot,” she says. “Do not let anyone, not even yourself, get in your head and make you believe that it’s too late or that you’re too far down one path to make a change. And sometimes, the discomfort of being in a space that feels too small for you or ill-fitting for you is just the impetus that you need to get serious about what excavation process and that soul-searching process to really uncover what lane it is you wanna be playing in.”

A “mind map” is a way to organize your thoughts visually. Mind maps are organized with a central idea—often represented by a single word that embodies the central topic—surrounded by branches of subtopics and closely related ideas.

Elaine first learned about the concept from supermodel Tyra Banks, who, she recalls, had a chart filled with “little circles [representing] all the different industries that Tyra wanted to build businesses in. And, over time, Tyra refined and refined and refined her mind map until each of those circles represented actual companies.”

You can create a mind map in four simple steps:

1. 1. Discover your nucleus. “Your Mind Map starts with your why,” Elaine says. “That should be the nucleus—your purpose needs to be at the very center and needs to be the throughline that connects all of these divergent projects, ideas, and industries.”
2. 2. Visualize your lanes. “The next step is to go back to that list of spaces you want to play in and make it visual,” Elaine says. “Take each of your [industry] buckets and draw circles around them.”
3. 3. Ruminate on desired projects. “Connect each bucket circle to a smaller circle that more precisely describes the type of project you’re aiming for—a specific project, job, or gig,” Elaine says. “Remember: Sometimes these circles might connect to more than one bucket.”
4. 4. Utilize your zone of genius. “Within each project, job, or gig, write down which of your pillars—passions, values, talents, or skills—this role hits,” she says. “It could be all of them or just one.”

All you need is a MasterClass Annual Membership and our exclusive video lessons from the likes of Elaine Welteroth (the former editor in chief of Teen Vogue and host of CBS’ The Talk), Issa Rae (the powerhouse multihyphenate behind HBO’s Insecure), Robin Arzón (the lawyer-turned-head instructor of Peloton), and other luminaries who have have embraced the twists and turns on the path to professional success. With their guidance, you’ll learn how to lean into your strengths, follow your heart, and build the career of your dreams.