Answer this simple question. Did you think that choosing your career and then the steps to achieve it forms career planning? Yes? You’re right. But if you thought that this is all there is to it, you’re wrong. Career planning is not something to be done once in your life. You cannot expect your career to pick up and go where you want it to go if you don’t plan for it correctly.
So, how do you plan your career? How do you make sure you derive satisfaction from your career? It’s not too difficult once you set out to do it. You need to remember a few pointers and things should be fine from there onwards.
- Regular affair – Make your career planning into a regular affair. Don’t think that once you’ve done it, you don’t have to do it again. In fact, the more often you do it, the better you will realize exactly what you want from life.
- Your wants/your needs – Wants and needs are two different sides of the same coin. You may need money for a house and car but your wants might be totally different. The ideal career would be one that strikes the right balance between the two.
- Introspection – Career planning is the time you need to introspect and sit down in a quiet place to ask yourself some questions. Is this what I want to do in life? Am I on the right path? Based on your answers to yourself, you will know if your career has panned out the way you wanted it to.
- Rewind – Go back to the time you started out. Think of what your dreams were at that moment. Have you discarded your dreams for reality? Have you followed the path prescribed by your heart? If not, maybe it’s time to reevaluate.
- Options – Look at all the options you have. If you are not happy with one branch of a certain type of work, you might be able to fit in elsewhere in the same work, but doing something else. For instance, if you’re a writer, but you don’t like the job you’ve built for yourself, writing articles for the newspaper, maybe you could utilize your skills to do something more to your liking.
- Transferable skills – Don’t limit your career to your job description. You might be working as an interior designer, but your skills could include many other options that could get you a job in another field which is more to your liking.
- Expand knowledge base – School was for learning. This is life. Right? Wrong! Learning is something that never subsides. It is a continuous process. Those people who are constantly seeking to broaden their knowledge base stand to gain the most because they’re perceived as people with an X factor.
- Setting goals – As part of career planning, you have to set goals regarding what you want to achieve. Unless you do that, you won’t even know how time flew by and you’re ready for retirement as well, without a clue as to what you have achieved.
Career planning is an important exercise, one that needs to be pursued just as you would pursue anything else regarding your career.
