Crafting a career development plan

In order to craft a career development plan, it is necessary to ruminate over several factors. The most important thing to do is to spend time cogitating and understanding yourself, your skills, your interests, your motivations and your values. You need to spare time to know more about yourself and your concerns; and what actually counts for you and how this measures up to you and your life.

A career development plan is simply a methodical and focussed technique for swotting where you happen to be in your career and deciding the position that you aspire to be at. Towards that purpose, you are required to set smart objectives so that you indeed reach that position.

How can you create a career development plan that is in consonance with your career goals? Here are four simple steps to do so:

· Determining your current position: Wherever you are now is your starting point. You can call it SP. It is important that you are aware of the following aspects:

v What all stimulate and motivate you the most?

v What were the factors that prompted your career choices?

v What was the methodology adopted by you to embark upon your present career path?

v What are your qualifications and skills, both academic and professional?

v What is the experience that you have gained so far?

v What are your concerns, leisure pursuits and pastimes?

· Deciding on the position that you aspire to be at: The position that you want to be is your career destination or the finishing point. You may call it the FP. With reference to the FP, you need to introspect and find answers to the following questions:

v At what positions do you visualise yourself one, five and ten years from now?

v Supposing that there were no limitations of time and you had at your disposal all the wherewithal, including influences to exert, what would you like to be?

v Whatever qualifications and skills that you possess and whatever experience you have to your credit, how have they helped you in discharging your role in your job?

v If things went tickety-boo, that is, you could make absolutely correct decisions and were not deficient of self-assuredness at all, what is the appointment or designation you would aspire to hold?

· Knowing what it involves to reach your aspired position: This step entails checking and validating actuality. It is nothing but bridging the disparity and space between your SP and FP. This is achieved by exhaustive study and making sound decisions. To illustrate the point, you receive an email informing that you can work part-time from home and earn a six figure compensation. Your excitement apart, what do you do? Don’t you carry out some ground-checks to ascertain the veracity of the proposal? You would definitely like to know details of the employer for whom you would be working and in all probability visit his office to make certain that you do not become a victim of a rip-off. And surely, you will not accept the offer at the face value of it. Of course, there will be several other concerns that you would like to be addressed and clarified. It is the same in your career. You will have to reflect on the time and money that are required to facilitate reaching your aspired position. Do you have them readily available? Or will arranging them will take time? If so, how will your planning be affected? You may have to make sacrifices. Are you willing to do so? 

· Reducing your plan to writing: Having identified actions required to bridge the gap between your present and aspired positions, the next step is to summarize your career development plan in a written form. You must list out the larger mosaic and the intervening actions that will propel you to your ultimate career objectives. When you have your plan reduced to writing, you will see it on a daily basis, thereby making its implementation an effortless affair. Your subliminal sense will prompt you to take action on issues that are essential for attaining your objectives. In case an objective appears to be big, you should split it into smaller sub-objectives and set out to achieve them one by one. Remember that success will come to you if you are steadfast in your outlook, relentless in your efforts and intelligent in your actions. And as you move along, you must keep monitoring the results achieved by you on a periodic basis so that you remain convinced that you are on the correct track.

If you do not want your career development plan to be a simple theoretical drill, you will have to seriously go about implementing it, In case you do not, it will gather dust hoping that someday, you may get going on it. And as you start working on it, small successes will accrue to indicate that you have been on the correct track.