9 Tips for Successful Career Planning
Before we start Career Planning with anything, there are pretty a few points related to career planning that we need to look into. Consider these few easy points to help you choose what your plan of action should be towards shaping your future successfully.
9 Tips for Successful Career Planning
Career planning should be a rewarding and positive experience. Here, then, are 9 tips to help you achieve successful career planning.
1. Decide Your Values: Simply put: what’s important to you? Do you value freedom? Do you like independence? Or working as a member of a team? Do you like structure? Or lack of structure? Working a lot of hours? Or working flexible hours? Do you want a job with a considerable paycheck? Or a job that provides significance to your life? These are all crucial questions that you must be able to answer because they will impact both your short and long-term happiness. Often people are able to answer these questions with greater conviction once they’ve experienced a sampling of various work environments and situations.
2. Know Your Strengths:
Before you consider whether you have an aptitude for a profession, ask yourself it is something you could enjoy doing for a long time. Determine what a job would have to be like to keep you satisfied and then look for jobs that can give you most of what you need. By choosing a career that you enjoy, you won’t feel like you are “working” as much.
3. Research, Research, Research!:
Too often people choose the wrong careers because they don’t know the myriad of vocations that exist within their field of study. This often results in misemployment and disenchantment. Time spent properly researching the profession that you intend to undertake, and the field you wish to enter, is vital. Part of this study should include conducting informational interviews with people who do what you would like to do for a living, visiting websites that contain blogs that are written by people in your elected field, and reading employment magazines that contain stories about the movers and shakers in your industry.
4. Finding the Right Atmosphere:
When choosing a career, think the sort of atmosphere that you feel most joyful in. Are you the kind of person who works better with people or with objects? Do you prefer motion and activity, or calm and quiet?
You’re more likely to do well in your career when you are in a comfortable environment.
5. Make Your Plan:
The most important advantage of having a plan is that it gives you a sense of direction in helping you reach your goals. In real life career planning, we choose the paths that we believe will take us to our destinations, but we have to be open to embarking upon new paths which may come out in the course of our journey. Just as having a plan is important, so is the importance of career planning to be flexible? It will keep you open to a realm of possibilities and help you arrive at your rightful destination.
6. Expose on Your Likes and Dislikes Needs and Wants:
Change is a factor of life; everybody changes, as do our likes and dislikes. Something we loved doing two years ago may now give us irritation. So always take time to reflect on the things in your life – not just in your career – that you feel most strongly about.
Make a two-column list of your most important likes and dislikes. Then use this list to examine your current job and career path. If your job and career still fall mostly in the like column, then you know you are still on the right path; however, if your job activities fall mostly in the dislike column, now is the time to begin examining new jobs and new careers.
Finally, take the time to really think about what it is you want or need from your work, from your career. Are you looking to make a difference in the globe? To be legendary? To become financially independent? To effect change? Take the time to understand the motives that drive your sense of success and happiness.
7. Set Career and Job Goals:
Build up a roadmap for your job and career achievement. Can you be successful in your career without setting goals? Of course. Can you be even more successful through goal-setting? Most research says yes.
A main component of career planning is setting short-term (in the coming year) and long-term (beyond a year) career and job goals. Once you begin this process, another component of career planning becomes reviewing and adjusting those goals as your career plans improvement or change – and developing new goals once you complete your earlier goals.
8. Get Some Experience:
Simply put: there is no alternate for experience. You need to get as much of it as rapidly as you can. Interning is a win-win plan for you and a prospective employer because they get free labor, and you get valuable experience. Without this experience, you remain idealistic if not unrealistic about the true-to-life rigors of the profession, and of the industry you want to work in. Gaining experience will help to prove your interests and pursuits, or help to re-direct them. Interning is by far the smartest thing to do in a tight job market while you seek full-time employment.
9. Career Planning Research Sources:
To find out more about different careers, use the following research tools:
1. Government employment agencies such as the Department of Labor or local employment office.
2. Department of Labor publications on employment options and career outlooks, such as Occupational Outlook Handbook and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. These can be found at your local library.
3. The Internet. Look at employment/job sites, employment forums, and sites run by temporary agencies and head-hunters.
These simple steps can help you get the maximum understanding with respect to how to start career planning ahead of time as to what can be a good career option for you and how you can go about it in the best possible way.
Best of luck in all of your career endeavors!