4 Steps to Guide You Throughout Your Career

Career planning is an activity every professional should participate in periodically throughout their working life. In addition to setting short and long-range goals, career planning can help you anticipate challenges you might encounter as you implement your plans.

Creating career plans involves reflection and identifying what strengths you can leverage that will help you make consistent progress.

Make Time for Reflection

Reflecting helps us better understand our challenges and appreciate what contributed to our progress. From there, we can determine the action steps we need to take to move forward in our careers.

Even if we aren’t completely sure of all of the steps we need to take, since some of the steps might depend upon our effectiveness in others, for example, our success in networking might impact the opportunities we receive. Planning can point us in the right direction and help us get started.

Get Started

Getting started takes an understanding of how to set goals and how to develop realistic action plans to support the goals. If you want to get started, I suggest focusing on the following aspects:

1. Self-discovery involves understanding your values, talents and interests; reviewing your options, and setting goals.
2. Professional development involves leveraging your strengths, exploring your interests, and taking action to improve.
3. Relationships involves being a source of value for others, focusing on quality, not quantity and connecting regularly.
4. Managing your reputation involves communicating effectively, using current technology, and understanding norms.

Take Responsibility for Your Career

I’ve seen professionals who were deliberate in the actions they took to advance their careers. I’ve also seen professionals who were solely dependent upon their company’s human resources department to manage their learning and career development, only to have the company close down after ten years.

What about you? Are you proactively managing your career or are you leaving it up to someone else?

Use a Career Road Map

Do you know where you’re going in your career? Do you have a career road map?  If you haven’t been proactive up to this point, now’s the time. Don’t wait. Schedule time to work on your career plans and follow through. Take steps to make progress in your professional life today. Use my career road map workbook to get started now. Questions? Contact me at tuesday@tuesdaystrong.com.