Career Planning Why Plan? Writing down a plan makes you statistically more likely to take the actions you intend to take!
But I don’t know exactly what I want to do! Even if you don’t know exactly what you want to do in the long run you can normally make a plan for the first few steps you need to take in order to help you with your career journey. So, for example, if you don’t have any ideas you might use some of the ideas in previous worksheets to set yourself a list of tasks like ‘try out a career matching quiz’ and ‘identify my top skills’ Making a Career Decision can seem daunting. You want to pick the ‘right’ career for you, however sometimes it is difficult to know what this is. Exercise: Developing a plan 1) Set yourself a general goal, like ‘get some career ideas’ or ‘find out about teaching’ 2) Then generate as many ideas as you can of things you could do to help you towards your goal. Write them all down. 3) Identify the ones that feel most realistic and that feel most useful 4) If some of these activities are quite big you might want to split them into smaller steps eg ‘get work experience’ could be split into ‘look up work experience opportunities online’ or ‘ask my tutor about work experience possibilities’
Developing a plan continued…. 5) Choose 2-5 tasks that you want to undertake. 6) Write down these goals in a SMART way, that is make sure that each target is: S – Specific, which means making it very exact M – Measurable, meaning something you will know when you complete A – Achievable, meaning it’s actually possible and realistic for you to achieve R – Relevant, meaning it will help you towards your larger goal of planning your career T – Time-bound, meaning you give yourself a time to do the task. Taking time to make your goals ‘SMART’ will make them a lot easier to achieve
Planning as a Process As you work through your plan you will want to review your plan regularly and write more goals as you complete your first targets. In this way career planning is a process that you don’t do just once but you are involved in through your life. In fact it is good practice to maintain regular career plans even when you are in work.
For Further Help UHI have a network of career coaches who can help you develop a plan. Check www.uhi.ac.uk/careercentre for further information
Using this sheet as part of your Personal Development Planning This sheet is the fourth in a suite of resources that can be used to help with Personal Development Planning (PDP). PDP is a structured process of reflection and personal development which any UHI student can engage in and is supported by a personalised online space. Check our website for more details: http://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/students/career-centre/while-youre-studying/pdp
Career Planning
20/3/12
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