Tips for Planning a Career Change
‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ is an old adage that’s particularly true of career change. Giving up your current job for a new career is a major life transition which, like all such transitions, needs to be planned well. A career change plan will help you to be efficient in how you focus your energy and divide up your time. ‘Looking for a full-time job is a full-time job’ is another well-worn but true saying. You plan how you’re going to spend each day at your current work— hopefully—so why not plan ahead for the job of finding a new career, one of the most important jobs of your life? Don’t know where to start? These career change planning tips will give you an idea of what needs to be done. 1.
Set a deadline
It’s all too easy to spend all your time planning instead of doing, especially when the task ahead is something as overwhelming as a career change. Set a deadline for when your plan needs to be finished by and this will help focus your mind on getting it done. 2.
Create a timeline
Just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean you can just whip up a ‘plan’ the night before the deadline. This is a career change we’re talking about here, not a school test you can cram for. To complete a good quality, effective plan on time, it’s necessary to plot a timeline detailing the different stages of the plan’s creation. 3.
Write it down
Even if you have the best memory in the world, you’ll need to write down your plan to make it concrete and something you’re likely to stick to. It doesn’t matter if you write it by hand in a notebook or create it as a Word document, just having something you can physically read through can be a great career change motivator.
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4.
Create short, medium and long-term goals
What should you actually include in your plan? There are many different stages of a career change and each stage will require you to do many different types of task. Some of these tasks will need to be repeated every day, some will take a week to do and some may have to be spread out over the course of a fortnight or a month. Writing down all the things you need to do and then sorting them into short, medium and long-term categories will give you clarity on what needs to be done on a day-to-day basis and what needs to be done over a longer period of time. 5.
Plan to do the right things
There’s no point creating a plan, if you don’t plan to do the kind of things you need to do in order to successfully change careers. Allocate time and resources to researching potential new careers and the type of employers to which you might want to apply. Plan how much time you’re going to spend on career change tasks and when and where you’re going to do them. Don’t forget that tasks relating to your career change can include networking and volunteering as well as skills training and applying for jobs.
This checklist has been created by Position Ignition Ltd, one of the UK’s leading career consulting companies and founders of the Career Ignition Club. Please contact enquiries@positionignition.com for more information or to suggest additional resources.
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