A career plan does not have to be long or complicated, but the essential aspect is that it needs to reflect your aspirations, skills and aptitudes, and steps to achieving those goals in life. By taking an insightful purview of these three areas, you can map out your future with a plan. From these three aspects, you will be able to determine the steps required to reach the career path.
Another essential fact about career planning is that it never stops. Once you reach a set goal, it is time to re-evaluate, set another goal, and then move forward with determination. Sometimes life may take a surprising turn and lead to fortunate circumstances or otherwise. If it occurs, it is time to pursue a new path but built on the foundation you have developed.
This spiral of planning can be started when you are still at school, but it will continue throughout your work career, sometimes even into retirement. If you need assistance to form your plan into a CV, don’t forget about those who offer resume writing service. These services can be very helpful in providing the up to date forms for your career area as well as the keywords associated with your industry. However, the truth of the matter is that if you fail to plan, the lack of planning will fail you.
Aspirations: What Do You Want In Life?
Before you begin the process, it is an excellent idea to determine what you value. In many ways, your values will drive your plan. Do you have a burning desire to achieve a particular goal: perhaps you want to be a writer, musician, or astronaut? Maybe you measure success for yourself in monetary terms? Maybe you want to travel to experience the world, or in the opposite direction, close family ties are essential, so remaining at home is the goal. For some people, this is a challenging step, but they may be able to determine what activities they enjoy. They are three primary areas of endeavor – working with people, working with things, and working with ideas. If you can identify where your preferences lie or where you excel, you can start the career path planning. There are many aptitude surveys to help you determine what you prefer. Sometimes it can be surprising what you discover about yourself.
After you have established these building blocks, you can move on to investigating a variety of career paths for a match based on your aspirations.
Skills, Knowledge, and Aptitude
It is essential that you take an honest look at yourself for all three areas: skills, knowledge, and aptitude. If you can determine these accurately, then you can match these qualities to a career path. If you are young, it is likely that not all of your skills will be developed but you can at least determine in what general areas your strengths lie. Are they in the field of mathematics, science and technology, or engineering? Or do you tend to excel in languages? Perhaps the arts is your passion? Maybe sports is where you will be most comfortable? Surveys can assist you in making these decisions, if you remain unsure. The surveys can act as another indicator, or a piece of evidence to consider. It is you who will make the final decision based on what you are learning about yourself.
With your skills, realize that some are transferable and can be applied to many careers; others are more job specific. For example, the ability to solve problems are more global while accurately throwing a baseball is more specific.
Make a list of your skills. It may be helpful to divide them into Global and Specific. From this list of skills, you can determine some careers that match your strengths. Again there are many software products to assist you and will offer a variety of career paths. Consider these suggestions carefully, as using your strengths often brings satisfaction which will lead to success.
Planning the Steps
Once you have gathered this information about yourself and determined a general area that is suitable for you, it is time to plan both Long-Term Goals and Short-Term Goals. The long-term goal may be to acquire the position of supervisor in a particular career area. The short-term goals could include a list of courses that you will complete, skills that need to be learned, projects or areas of work that would build your skills, or joining an outside related agency to develop leadership strategies and to broaden your view on the entire industry. But remember it is favorable to be flexible. The key is in recognizing opportunities. You may even organize these short-term goals into two years and five-year steps. Or immediate objectives and goals that need time to achieve to reach the Long-Term Goal of supervisor.
The SMARTER system can help guide you through the process of writing goals.
Specific: write the goal, so you know what the details are
Measurable: write the goal, so you know when you will complete it
Achievable: make sure you can complete your goal, make it applicable to your talents
Realistic: avoid your dreams, plan in steps that are right for your skills and abilities
Timely: put a timeframe for achieving your goal
Empowering: the goals must be personal for you, they need to motivate you
Reviewable: take advantage of happenstance, the goals must be flexible
Here are examples to help you write goals
Short-Term Goals
“I want to acquire better skills as a writer and to learn new techniques.”
While this goal sets a direction and is laudable, it is too vague.
Better
“I will complete (Measurable) the course XYZ (Specific) to increase the number of writing techniques I can use (Achievable) so that my writing articles are more understandable to the reader (Realistic) in 3 months’ time.” (Timely).
The statement is empowering since it sets a direction based on a personal need. And hopefully, if the writer of the goal finds a better way to improve his or her writing, they will remain flexible enough to change the specifics. Perhaps there arises an opportunity to attend a weekend workshop with a specific author that will meet these goals too. (Reviewable)
But the success will be in the implementation of your career planning. Once you have a written plan, start with small steps to achieve your goals. After you have a plan, you can get help from a resume writer, now that you have the information to provide them. But remember to celebrate your achievements to build motivation. It is likely that the processes are to be repeated many times over your career as you achieve success and then change your long-term goals.
It is a path of continuous progress, so think like a professional.
Guest article written by: Rajat Chakraborty has been a content writer and marketer for last 8 years. He suggests his clients working and effective content strategies that can grow traffic massively. Other than this, he has been a successful Amazon affiliate marketer for last 4 years and owns 5 Amazon niche sites. He runs a company named SEOPAGE1 which has a few sister concerns including Killercontentwriters.com. He can be reached at: [email protected].