What is career plan?
A career plan or statement identifies short- and long-term career goals and the necessary steps and actions you can take to achieve them. A career plan should be written document of your career goals and how you will achieve all the goals and objectives set in your plan. Avoid having your career plan just in your head; it should be clearly written and possibly memorized and internalized. Whiles the plan is the final product the planning is a cyclical process.
What is Career planning?
Career planning refers to the process of identifying career goals and developing strategies and tactics to achieve them. In order to get into the process of career planning it will be important to identify the components of a career plan which are:
- Career Goals and objectives
- Knowledge and Skills Strategy
- Branding Strategy & Tactics
- Work plan
- Performance measurement
The career planning process starts with career discovery. This process is an essential component which supports other sections of the plan by clarifying your interests, talents, skills, strengths, dislikes and aspirations. The action planning follows dealing with strategies, activities, outputs and outcomes including budget. The last part is about performance measurement, review, evaluation and monitoring.
The background of the career plan is the section where you will enter your bio. So it simply states your name, date of birth, education and possible work experiences.
Career Goals and objectives
In this section you will state your career goal and objectives. The career goal is the broader more long-term vision for yourself. On the other hand, the objectives are relatively short to medium term and will help you on the way to your goal.
Do not scratch your head to come up with a goal. A goal should be developed based on careful analysis of yourself and gathering enough information from friends, teachers, associates, parents and family. Just finding out what they think should help you excel in your strengths and pointers to your career path.
Knowledge and Skills Strategy
On the path to any career goal is always the need to acquire new skills and knowledge to enhance your capacity. In your career plan you ought to state what knowledge and skills you require and how you will attain them. For instance, if your goal is to be a Musician you may need to develop vocal skills, instruments, writing, public speaking and many more. With these skills you will need to determine how you will acquire them such as online research, weekend courses, distance learning, enrollment to a school etc.
Branding and marketing
Your career plan boils down to identifying and specializing on your professional or career persona.
Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception by positioning yourself as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating yourself from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.
Determine your personal brand and the values you need to cultivate focusing on helpful supportive ideals and values and well laid out visibility strategy.
No one can go far in a career without visibility either in your organization, sector or industry, you must be deliberate and intentional about it.
Similarly, here you look at how you will market yourself and network to gain career visibility. Here is where you determine which professional groups to join, online profiles and presence, participation in professional discussions, resume and CV strategy etc.
In the work plan section, you will outline the activities you have to carry out in order to reach your career goal. It is simply developing your roadmap and it should include, activities, milestones, outputs and desired outcomes.
The budget section adds cost to your career plan and is mainly a costing of your work plan. It is here you will outline cost of acquiring new skills, training, equipment, apprenticeship or acquiring further education etc.
The section on performance measurement is where you will state how you intend to measure success, what are your targets, indicators, sources and means of verification. It is the portion where you will tell how success looks like and how you can objectively pursue it.
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