5 Stages of Planning Your Career
The point of planning your career is in balancing your wishes against opportunities. Balancing the opportunities offered by the labour market against your own opportunities to reach the desired career heights. You need to assess your wishes and opportunities, choose the necessary direction of the available ones, make the decision and act. Choosing the direction of your professional development is a serious decision, making which is impossible without gradual collection and analysis of the necessary information. Such work usually includes 5 stages.
The analysis of your current professional status
Assess your knowledge, skills, experience, education, qualification, and track record. Consider all the details of your status, that are directly or indirectly related to your professional career - age, sex, family status, etc. The first goal of such analysis is to get an overview of directions of professional activity where you can fulfil yourself potentially. The second goal is to gather information about possibilities of changing your current professional status - from changing your positioning on the labour market to gaining the experience, knowledge and skills that are necessary for a successful career.
The analysis of your career expectations and preferences
Analyze your career expectations and preferences - what professional spheres, posts and trades are interesting for you, what post you see yourself at in the near future. The goal of such analysis is to define the directions of the professional activity where you would like to fulfil yourself.
The analysis of the labour market
Analyze supply and demand on the labour market - the employers’ requirements to the candidates, the job content, the number of job offers, the offered level of salary. Complete and prepare to discuss the list of potentially available professions, posts, trades and directions. Assess the experience and the level of qualification of your competitors on the labour market.
Defining the approximate variants of your career plans
Define the approximate variants of career plans and the conditions of taking the desired posts. Define the opportunities to develop the tactic and technical characteristics necessary for your career - knowledge, skills and experience.
Planning your career
Discuss the various plans for your career growth, choose the most realistic ones and agree on details. Don’t forget about sound realism assessing your career plans. Assess your professional status critically from in terms of periods for professional development and factors that can be influenced. You can gain experience and knowledge, but you will hardly become a successful musician or the top manager in a bank if you have been working as a computer programmer for the past 10 years.