Career Planning

Is a practice of planning an employment pathway in consideration of abilities, interests, responsibilities towards an ultimate career goal. This helps us to make a number of related jobs sum up to a career rather than being back and forth between jobs. A strategic guide that helps through short, medium, and long term goals between education and work opportunities. A continuous process that may be revised when life circumstances change to bring new creation out of changed circumstances.

The steps in planning a career include:

  1. Clarify Interests and preferences
  2. Identify career fields
  3. Review your abilities, experiences and education
  4. Network professionally
  5. Align yourself with future employment trends
  6. Finalize career plan
  7. Notate observations and thoughts.

What are your professional and personal interests or the areas that make you curious or bring you concern. You can start by making a list of these interests in attempt of creating a survey for you to assess career interest and activities. The main question to answer in identifying your opinions that interests align with others and what fields or areas of study could these interests be best fueled by work?

Use these deliberations to create a career goal for a specific job, field or work, and then create an employment pathway of jobs leading up, preparing for the job stated in your goal. Take account of benefits and costs of different jobs and benefits they give and examine trade-offs between the expectations of a job and your preferences in your personal life regarding social and cultural aspects. Do you prefer to be close or far from family, do you prefer constant or variable climate, urban or rural areas, close or far from work. You may have to sacrifice on some of these preferences when starting out to achieve your goals quickly,.

Understanding yourself is important to having an accurate and useful career plan. You need to meditate about your abilities, education, experiences, interests, preferences, principles, standards, qualities, and values. Your abilities are the qualities that allow you to perform tasks of a job including physically, mentally, and mechanically. Another way is to think about what you are proficient at, make a list of these and use it for your career plan. An aptitude is the natural abilites or talents you have. Evaluate what you have been doing with your life with jobs, organizations. Look at your past jobs and determine the different work-style or how you relate to the data, people, work environment, and tasks at the job. Where are the demands for highly skilled workers, and how does technology impact jobs in the future.

Your career plan should have four phases of short, medium, long and retirement preparation. Short consist of the first three years, medium between three and five years and long term between five up to 10, and extended is beyond 10 years. This helps you plan for higher paying more involved work that may require years of experience with specific functions. We set the long term career goals to help guide the shorter and medium term employment pathway of the jobs giving us the experience needed to fulfill the skills needed for the greater senior level work.

Here, the chosen Job is Actuary and we notate the experience needed
Here, we replace each function with an entry level job where we would perform that function. We could add more, use a hyperlink for each job, and highlight based on our preference on other characteristics.
Here, We notated one role for the designation of Short, Medium, Long and Extended Terms; each adjacent row shows a progression of jobs or positions in their available term, with hyperlinks for reference.

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