Some people have a career plan set out for them from a very young age but such people are few and far between. If you’re reading this it’s very likely that you’re not one of those people who always planned to study a specific course at a specific university and end up qualifying as a lawyer, doctor or whatever their predestined career plan dictated. However, it’s never too late to start planning the rest of your career. Indeed if you want to truly succeed a career plan is the only way to go. Success is very hard to come by in any context without a plan. Whatever stage you’re at in your career, these tips will help you build your very own career plan.
- Devise a Strategy
Start by deciding on what it is you want for your career and working out how you’re going to get it. If you drift through your career without goals in mind or you have goals but you have no idea how you’re going to reach them, you’re missing out on the opportunity to make your professional life so much more than it currently is.
- Set Realistic Goals
Whatever goals you decide upon, be sure to make them realistic. Being pragmatic apropos your career ambitions will help you devise a career plan that you can actually stick to. With a plan that’s realistic as opposed to over-ambitious you’ll know that anything you’ve asked yourself to do is possible.
- Keep Your Radar On
Whoever you’re currently employed by, pay attention to what’s going on around you in the workplace. Whether you notice managers and leaders having many hushed, urgent meetings and throwing around words such as “downsizing” and “restructuring” or you realise that several people directly above you in the chain of command are leaving the organisation and thus vacating their positions you can adjust your career plan to accommodate whatever seems likely to happen next in your career, be it redundancy or promotion.
- Get Quality Contacts
It doesn’t matter what kind of career objectives you’ve included in your plan — you’re going to need people to help you achieve them. However, you need to pick the right people for this and not just anyone who’s around. Your network shouldn’t be about the quantity of contacts but the quality of contacts. Seek to connect with people who you can see being valuable to you and your career at some point in the future. Also, make the effort to stay connected to existing contacts who have helped you in the past and will be able to help you in some way with your current career plans because they know you well and they themselves have the right connections and interesting ideas.
- Take Life into Account
You can’t make a career plan in isolation because your career is, of course, not isolated from the rest of your life. The career plan has to be aligned with your intentions and expectations for other areas of your life. When integrating your career plans with your life plans you need to take into account factors such as your geographic location and your relationships with your family, partner and anyone else likely to be affected by your plans.
- Schedule in Learning & Development
No career plan is perfect without the inclusion of ideas on how to work on your learning and growth on a continuous basis. Taking responsibility for our learning and development throughout our careers will help us to enrich our professional lives and also give us a taste of what it’s like to start taking control of our career path as a whole.
- Get a Second Opinion
Once you’ve created your career plan it can be useful to show it to someone who knows you well and will give you an objective opinion on it. Reflecting on the plan together with this person will enable you to allow it to change shape and grow. Find someone you trust, such as your mentor or a close friend, and perhaps schedule regular times to review your plan as your career progresses and you change and mature as a person.