When you’re an emerging leader, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out how to get from here to there. You know you have big goals for your future career, but the path isn’t always clear.Here are three career strategies that you can use to gain additional clarity and help understand what you need to do to accomplish your goals and your dreams.

That you can follow is actually called “prewriting your résumé.” You can envision the job that you’d like to have in three years or five years and create a résumé for yourself that actually says what your responsibilities are, what your title is, and, most critically, the jobs and the responsibilities that you need to have between here and there.

That enables you to think strategically about how you’re going to gain access to that experience. Whether it’s taking courses, doing volunteer work, signing up for additional initiatives, or whatever it is, to make sure that you are prepared in all ways possible to get the job that you are seeking.

You want to map out your relationships. And what this means, essentially, is that there are people who are presently in your life who are going to be critical to your future success. It’s very useful to think through what the depth of your relationship with that person is. You could color-code it, even: green for someone that you have a deep and good relationship with; yellow if you know them a little bit but not enough; and red for people that you really ought to know but don’t.

As you think about your future career progression and who are the people that can be influential with that, it’s important to try to turn all of your red relationships into yellow and all of your yellow relationships into green so that you can make sure that you are cultivating the connections that will enable you to move forward.

You need to recognize that your career progression is not going to be a straight line. The career ladder, these days, is much more like a career lattice, to use a phrase popularized by the thinker Cathy Benko. Sometimes you take a detour; sometimes you move laterally in order to move up. Don’t get too stressed out if you’re not progressing in exactly the way that you imagined.

Sometimes the journey and the things that you learn along it enable you to become an even better leader, and sometimes, even though it may not seem it in the moment, it allows you to get to your destination faster.

No matter what career stage you’re in, it’s essential to keep building momentum toward your remote career goals. You’ll be able to meet your goals if you are intentional in the adjustments you need to make as a remote worker to get there.

One of the best ways to land the remote career of your dreams is with a steady stream of legitimate jobs to consider. Take the tour and discover all of the ways that a FlexJobs membership can support both your career and work-life balance goals at every stage of your career.