EngineerHer

There’s a moment most women engineers recognise.

You’ve had one too many bad days. One too many meetings where your idea was ignored until a man said it. One too many performance reviews that praised your reliability without mentioning your promotion. One too many Sunday evenings spent dreading Monday morning.

And you think: right. That’s it. I’m updating my CV.

So you open a blank document, stare at it, and then either spend three hours rearranging bullet points or close the laptop in frustration and tell yourself you’ll do it at the weekend.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing. The CV isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t yet have career clarity – and without it, you’re just shuffling words around on a page hoping something sticks.

Why career clarity has to come before the CV

A CV is a marketing document. Its job is to present you compellingly to a specific audience for a specific purpose.

But if you don’t know what that purpose is – if you haven’t decided what you actually want, what you absolutely won’t accept, and what kind of work would make you feel like yourself again – then your CV is just a list of things you’ve done. It has no direction. It won’t open the right doors because you haven’t figured out which doors are the right ones yet.

This is the step most career advice skips. Everyone wants to talk about LinkedIn optimisation and interview technique and salary negotiation. All of that matters. But it comes later.

First, you need to know yourself.

What women engineers career clarity actually involves

I’m not talking about a vague sense of wanting something better. I mean getting specific about three things:

Your non-negotiables. Not your preferences – your hard limits. The working conditions, the management styles, the organisational cultures that you will not accept again no matter how impressive the job title looks. You already know what these are. You’ve lived them. The question is whether you’ve given yourself permission to name them as requirements rather than complaints.

Your values in action. Not the ones that sound good on paper – integrity, autonomy, impact – but the ones that show up in your real experience. The moments you felt most like yourself at work. The moments something crossed a line and you couldn’t shake the anger. Your values live in those moments, and they’re the most reliable filter you have for whether an opportunity is actually right for you.

Your honest readiness. Not whether you’re perfectly ready – nobody ever is – but where you actually are right now. Are you in early stages, starting to feel the friction? Building momentum, knowing change is coming but not sure how? Or ready to move, and the real risk is staying still long enough that the decision gets made for you?

When you have clarity on all three of these things, everything else gets easier. The CV writes itself. The conversations with recruiters have direction. The job descriptions either light something up in you or they don’t, and you trust that response.

The mistake I see most often

Senior women engineers – smart, experienced, technically excellent – rushing to the job market without doing this work first.

They update the CV. They reach out to recruiters. They go for interviews. And then they accept a role that looks fine on paper and feels wrong within six months.

Not because they made a bad decision. Because they made an uninformed one. They were running away from something rather than toward something specific.

Women engineers career clarity isn’t about being picky. It’s about being precise. And precision is something engineers are actually very good at – we just don’t always apply it to our own careers.

Where to start

If you’re reading this and thinking yes, this is exactly where I am – I’ve put together something that will help.

It’s called the Engineering Career Clarity Guide, and it walks you through the three things I’ve just described – your non-negotiables, your values in action, and your readiness assessment – with structured exercises designed specifically for women in engineering.

It’s free. It takes about an hour. And it’s the foundation of everything I do with the women I coach.

You can download it here: The Engineering Career Clarity Guide

Because before you update your CV, before you call a recruiter, before you start scrolling job boards at 11pm – you need to know yourself first.

That’s where everything else begins.