Get going with your career planning

Career planning helps you to achieve your aspirations pertaining to what you would like to do in your working life. You are thus better poised to direct your efforts on what you should do when thinking about a new career. Evidently, career planning will also facilitate your career advancement in the line that you are currently in.

Planning needs time and meticulous deliberation. You need to reflect on what you ought to do both at present and as a follow-up and additional skills that you need to master or qualifications that you need to acquire. But any plan that you make will always be subject to alteration and modification simply because line is not likely to follow a sure expected course. Therefore, you must make allowances for such changes that can relate to job market ups and downs; precedence accorded by organisations to various issues; globalisation trends and resultant competition; and preferred job skills. Needless to state, but very significant is the pint that all such changes can seriously impact the shape and contours of your current and future employment.  

 The best advice may be to embrace a positive, flexible, forward-looking attitude.  Be prepared for the next job, whatever and wherever that may be. Downsizing, layoffs, and gaps between projects can transform into positive growth, new opportunities, and expanding skills if flexibility is part of your career plan. 

To know the start-point of your career path may be a difficult task. Career planning helps you in this context and hence is an important activity. You get to make a blueprint for your actions to discern your objectives and acquire requisite knowhow.

When you do career planning, you achieve several things, notable being:

· You are able to make knowledgeable selections.

· A perfect match between you and your selected role is reached.

· Attainment of desired standing, contentment, respect, financial stability and your other life goals is facilitated.

· Your employment prospects are boosted.

· You are able to display flexibility to adjust to varied work imperatives.

Besides the above, you stand better poised to fulfil various organisational hopes and thus position yourself firmly in the employment market. However, to achieve the foregoing, you will have to exhibit a high degree of motivation, knowledge, responsiveness and professionalism.

The process of career planning is an unending one. In order to discern the point from where you can begin, you can divide it into four major stages as under:

· Valuation & re-evaluation: You need to find out by asking yourself questions on the skills you possess and how can you vouch for them. In addition, you should also know what serves to inspire you. Is it social standing, money, career success, societal issues or social service? There could be a horde of other factors that can have a bearing on your career planning. While you own state of health, financial state and domestic obligations can be important, issues like official curbs and an absence knowledge about of prevalent job market conditions are also significant. You need to keep all of them in mind.

· Inquiries & investigative studies: You need to conduct research and find out more about different job roles, industries and companies. Having identified them, you should ascertain what are the access roads and prerequisites; prospects for growth obtainable; struggles and races involved; pay structures; and ensuing and future tendencies. You could also meet people in different pursuits and determine more about their work and companies, including how they got into the careers that they are in.

· Setting objectives: After mulling over your skills, proclivities and precedence to various factors as also having studied the prospects, you need to assess all the information collected so that you can set the bearing on your compass. It will be essential to evaluate various job functions and identify which goes best with you and whether you are qualified for it or not. All these action will help you to discern the possible path that you can adopt, but does not necessarily signify a career decision. The objectives that identify could be precise or even broad-based. Nevertheless, you would have pinpointed a position from where you can take A continual evaluation thereafter will help you discover if you set realistic objectives. It is always better to split your objectives into smaller sub-objectives and set deadlines for their attainment.

· Getting into an action mode: This implies taking initiative to move ahead and entails discerning different opportunities and preconditions to make use of them. The foregoing means identifying openings, submitting applications and preparing to succeed in the selection process.

It should be remembered that you need to evaluate and re-examine whatever has transpired in each of the above phases. The exercise will become more fruitful on account of the experience that you undergo and the perception that you gain post facto. You will thus be in a better position to fine-tune your career plan or even alter your strategy altogether. You may decide to go in for another course of action or make a radical alteration to your objectives. But the important point is to get going with your career planning.