Plan, develop & administer your career

Career advancement is an ongoing process that calls for intense focus and determination. Put in simple words, the planning that you do for it helps you to reflect over who you are and the status that aspire to accomplish in your career.

In order for you advance in your career, continue with your learning efforts and achieve a good degree of dynamism, you should assess changing situations and the appropriateness of the goals that you set for yourself. And if you fail to do so, you will have a monotonous life ahead of you that will offer no satisfaction.

You should remember that you are unlikely to achieve anything in your career unless you set objectives for yourself. It is necessary that you are clear about the position that you aspire to reach from a year’s time from now as also at the endpoint of your career journey. You hold also reflect upon the level of satisfaction that you are deriving. The fact is that career development is not merely progressing through your job alone; it also implies possible career changes to stay in harmony with changes of your aspirations and requirements. It is also essential that you ponder over facets that you would like to specialise in or be an expert at. Your passion to acquire more knowledge about a specific line of activity or associated skills will serve to inspire you to do well in your career. Therefore, it is all up to you to unearth your fortes.

Having pondered over the above issues and identified your true calling, you need to find out ways and means to give it a concrete shape. That is what career planning is all about. You will need to identify the best course that will take you to your envisioned destination. Making a plan for your career journey will invariably necessitate the following:

• Deciding on actions that ought to be executed by you with utmost determination and sincere conviction so that you emerge as the most suitable candidate for the post that you aspire to be in.
• Single out various qualifications that you need to acquire over a period of time and a timetable for the same. 
• Researching different situations, groundings and achievements of men and women who reached similar positions.
• Identifying different organisations where vacancies exist for you and where you can companies and organisations that can offer you opportunities to achieve your objectives.
• Contemplating over your existing contact base and the way it can be further expanded to achieve a sustainable professional network.
• Selecting specific steps that you should be taking to move on the preferred course to facilitate attaining the objectives that you have set for yourself. 

The goals that you identify for accomplishment together with your plans should be clear and precise. It should be kept in mind that nothing unfolds as planned and hence, you will have to keep assessing and evaluating things on a continual basis to institute corrective measures to stay on course. If you document them in your planning, you provide a shape to them, thereby making it easy for accomplishment. They will also serve to remind you of various actions that you ought to take to move in the direction of your aspirations.  

Career management is a sum total of two things - career development and career planning. The responsibility to manage your career is entirely yours and that highlights the need to guard against anything going off-track. Your employers will seldom offer you full opportunities to stay abreast with the latest developments and acquire necessary proficiencies to make certain that you do not become indispensable. They will encourage you so long as their interests are served. In the light of the foregoing, if your career objectives are not in sync with the prospects offered by your employers, the responsibility to assess the entire gamut of your actions to remain dynamic is yours and yours alone.

There will may facets and circumstances at your workplace and outside it that will have an influence on your career. You need to be aware of them and this can be possible if you manage your career by periodical reviewing of your advancement planning to include re-evaluation of your career objectives. There are bound to be unexpected roadblocks and you will have to find ways and means to negotiate them. Your career plan will make certain that your move ahead is smooth and to your advantage.