The need to plot your career path

When you plan and plot your career path, you ensure that you are not rendered aimless or lost at any stage of your career journey. And when you get a job, it is not going to be forever; this point if comprehended will highlight the importance of career planning. Companies and organisations, big or small invariably focus on their interests; and such interests need not be in sync with the concerns of the employees.

Your company can help you to manage your career in limited ways. Making available some opportunities for training, granting promotions when due and training you to handle higher responsibilities are perhaps issues that you can bank upon your company. The responsibility to decide on what you want to accomplish, decide on the ways and means to do so and getting into appropriate jobs to facilitate making your dreams come true is yours and yours alone. Nobody will ever understand the significance of career planning for you other than you.

When you plot your career path, you cater to uncertainties that may strike you in the future. The benefits that accrue in the process are many, but generally pertain to:

·  Acquisition of skills that render you more in demand in the job market.

·  Your capability to switch jobs effortlessly.

·  Gaining experience to shoulder greater responsibilities.

·  Getting trained to take sound decisions.

·  Comprehending the larger picture for affecting better assessments.

·  Being better poised to understand how and where different appointments and responsibilities fit in your entire scheme of things.

·  Reaping knowledge about true self-worth and remuneration packages possible.

·  Securing job-satisfaction and work-life balance.

Whatever career path you plot, it should reveal and demonstrate your goals and aspirations alike. As years roll by, you may have to reassess things and put into operation midterm alterations, rectifications and modifications. Your career journey may span through over four decades and hence, you would be required to pass through different life stages as follows:

·  Up to 25 years age: During these years, you are still subject to influences by your parents, teachers and even friends to a large extent. And you also tend to look up to them for advice and encouragement on all possible issues, including higher education. The hard truth is that you lack contact with people who can offer you comprehensive and all-encompassing career advice.

·  25-35 years age: These years are essentially a sort of a beginning or an onset. You tend to still debate about the career that you are in and which selected while at school or college. The foregoing notwithstanding, it is some years that have been through the rut and gained significant experience of what life is actually all about. Such experience could be in the form of challenges, competitions and even knowledge. This is the age when people also settle down and have a family; and that is why domestic influences also started exerting and could even engineer a change in your plotted career path. 

·  35-50 years age: This is an important stage because it is during these years that you reach the pinnacle of your career or get to know that it is the end of everything. This decade and a half is generally characterised by development and advancement; and new opportunities emerge in consonance with your previous experience. The significance of this phase can be gauged by the fact that you will exercise major career-related choices to make certain that you are moving in the correct direction. However, in case there happens to be some element of disenchantment, you will per force take remedial action to offset the disadvantages that may accrue in subsequent years.

·  50-65 years age: This stage can be rather incommodious and vexing for many people. This is largely on account of the need to have an add-on career plan necessitated by either a decision to quit a job or even retrenchment. The age factor will force the career path to go through a drastic modification and revision; most people will seek work options that are comfortable.

·  Beyond 65 years age: After attaining this age, most people tend to decide on the clear-cut and well-defined role that their career ought to play in their lives. If that be so, your motivation can shift towards something that perhaps was never your focus of attention in the decades gone by.  

In the light of the above, your career planning has to be such that it adapts itself to changing situations. You will thus be required to evaluate issues on a regular basis to discern whether you are achieving whatever you set out for. In your quest towards accomplishing your objectives, you may modify your plan so that there is a perceptible improvement of your status. But if you fail to assess things, there is every possibility of going off track. And that is where your networking is likely to pay dividends because good, new openings are rarely advertised. More importantly, you should never slow down on your efforts to remain updated at all times so that you are, at all times, ready to confront challenges.  Last but not the least, you should not forget that it is only when you resort to good planning that you will succeed in transforming otherwise indescribable imaginings into reality.