The technique of career planning

Any time spent in career planning is not wasted for the simple reason that such planning puts you in a forward-moving mode in a direction that you like your compass to indicate. When you engage in career planning, you acquire immense transparency and intelligibility pertaining to your career aims. Career planning per se should be undertaken prior to setting out on your maiden job hunt.

More often than not, men and women tend to get bogged down during the initial stages itself. This is largely because of the variety of career options available and the tags of advantages attached to them tend to lure everybody. The career options available are rather bewildering and prompt feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. You thus get to view a career option as unsuitable for you, though in actuality it is not so.

Career planning can help you in ways more than one. You can approach the process in two ways. The first method entails discerning what you have a penchant for and then go for it without bothering for it may offer you subsequent years. In the second method, you discern what actually inspires you and then you acquire the requisite skills and proficiencies for it. While if you follow the first method, the entire career journey that you undertake will be a gratifying ride; and if you follow the second approach, you will work your way up gradually towards your incentive, something that could be enumerated as an outcome of your very pursuit. But, either way, you get and come to be whatever you aspire for.

Irrespective of the path that you elect to trudge upon, it is essential that you are aware of all your plusses and minuses, your strongpoints and weak-points. You need to carry out an honest introspection to evaluate yourself. You should recall all your achievements, all pats on your backs and all praises and commendations. In addition, you should also recollect efforts and events that really ignited fervour and enthusiasm in you. If you make a record of your attainments and accomplishments, you will be surprised to see that a pattern or precedent will surface. You will discern that perhaps you excel at organising events or engaging in physical doings; or at creative work or tending to poor and needy. Each of your penchants highlights some innate attribute of yours or manifests a career choice by itself. Where any of your inherent attribute is highlighted, they could well turn out to be valuable assets in your future career preferences.

The next step is to identify things that motivate and encourage you – things that you wish for. All things that one wishes for are actually imaginings and visions in some form or the other; and perhaps always meant to be attained. Having identified whatever you aspire for, you should find where exactly you stand between your current status and your eventual objective. This portrait will become richer, more vibrant and flawless; and as it does so, you will experience a feeling of self-assuredness, consciousness and single-mindedness. These qualities, once identified will tell you what your plus-points, rather marketable plus-points are.

It is also possible for you to take note of careers that offer you a standard of living or even specific returns. Evidently, these have to be founded on the degree of ambition enjoyed by you as also your very outlook. To illustrate the point, a marketing career will be ideal for you if you love travelling and meeting people. It is essential that all your responses to introspection conducted by you should be candid, truthful and devoid of any conjectures or presuppositions. There are several people who get carried away by glitzy fallacies and are compelled to change their decisions subsequently. The crux is that you should take up a career that is your cup of tea. Remember that progress, recompenses, incentives, appreciations and contentment are a result of only one singular disposition – you must be in love with your job.   

Once you decide on the bearing that you need to set on your career compass, you need to build up your capabilities and proficiencies. Different careers call for different competencies and which cannot be acquired by a single training course. You will be able to excel in the pursuit that you elect to follow only if you aim to be nothing short of No. 1. It will be necessary that you imprint your personal marque on it. In addition, apprenticeship training, volunteer work and informational interviews, etc. are some other ways to get to know what your future will be like and what you need to do to gear up for it.

There is no career that does not call for good communication skills. You should be adept at both spoken and written communications. There are other skills that you should also focus on, notable being developing a social attitude, adhering to workplace ethics, working under stress and being an eternal learner.

If you have an objective, the need to be absolutely clear about it needs no emphasis. It is only then that you should begin inching forward towards it. And as you move ahead, the process of acquisition of skills and knowledge will be concurrent. But the most important thing is to take the first step forward.