Career Planning – A Continual Learning, Acquiring and Strategizing Process

Structured career planning of your career and management of your choice to become successful is known as an active career strategy. If indeed you have successfully planned out your career then the outcome of all that planning and management would be the ultimate achievement of a goal, personal fulfillment and job satisfaction, work and life balance and financial security for the future.

However, career planning is not a one-time effort; it is a continual and ongoing process that may help an individual throughout his/her life. Roughly speaking the process of planning a career includes,

• Focusing and then streamlining your interests, skills, preferences, and values.
• Exploring work, learning and life opportunities available in the surrounding.
• Ensuring that your job schedule fits with your life circumstances.
• Continuously tuning your plans regarding work and learning ways to balance both work and personal life.

What is Classified as a Career?

Traditionally, careers have been restricted to a single trade skill or choice of employment, business or profession for the complete working life of a person. However, in recent times, a person’s career can include all types of employment choices that can range from semi-professional to professional and from semi-skilled to skilled jobs.

Furthermore, earlier on the norm was to stick to a single profession choice for the entire life, however, with the rise of both necessities and opportunities, the pattern has drastically changed, and individuals continuously seek chances to grow further even if it involves a repeated change of career line.

Career development, therefore, also includes making severe career choices and decisions and this may involve leaving one career path altogether to examine success in another. It will further propagate the exploration and learning process as the nature of work changed; goals will change, newer objectives will have to be met, and work/life balance will have to be sought anew.

As the connotation and implication of career changes in one’s life, so will his objectives, aims and goals and with that the process and strategies to achieve that. So career counseling has become quite diverse and complicated with time.

Some Stages of Career Planning You Need To Know

There are four essential stages involved in Job Planning which you need to work through especially if you are just starting up on the journey to your career. The steps involved in effective and efficient planning for your occupation include;

• Never stop acquiring new knowledge, and this should include your hunger to ask and learn.
• Don’t bow down from work-related responsibilities.
• Build your career-related contact network.
• Relate to your current job and identify what your next goal/job would be
• Focus on your dreams to make them a reality and pick the right tools to do that.

Types of Career Planning You Need To Know

There are two significant types of career planning that you need to know.

A.   Short-Term Career Planning

The short-term planning for your future has to do with your ability to develop realistic goal and objectives, which you will be able to accomplish in the nearest future and is based on a time frame which may be from coming year to any time in the future.

To be able to achieve those goals, you will have first to remove all career barriers. Career barriers include the following,

a.    Personal barriers

It involves lack of motivation, procrastination, laziness and even apathy.

b.    Family pressure

It is the expectation laid down by family members and the pressure to follow a particular career path or similarly to avoid specific careers.

c.    Peer pressure

It is the expectation and competition that one feels from the peer members.

For a short-term planning, you must analyze,

a.    Your current and future lifestyle

b.    Your current and future like and dislikes in all aspects.

c.    Your dreams and passions.

d.    Your strong and weak points

e.    What you feel success is

f.      Your personality

g.    Your idea of a dream job

B.    Long-Term Career Planning

The long-term planning for a career is planning that is expected to last for up to 5 years for you to reach your goal and it requires more considerable information and preparation for it to be easily done.

The career scene and workplaces are constantly and rapidly changing, with that the skills, knowledge and abilities required must also accordingly transform. Therefore your long-term career planning must include strategies to cope with the growing demand of the career scene. This strategizing must consist of prospects of first identifying and then developing the core skills needed to succeed in the ever-changing scenario.

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