How to Make Superior Career Planning and Management? Discover Most Effective Tools Techniques and Pathways of Career Planning and Management !!!

Abstract:

Career Planning Management is a life-long process of investing resources to accomplish your future career goals. It is a continuing process that allows you to adapt to the changing demands of our dynamic economy. 

Career planning and management is a continuous process of learning from your experiences and moving forward in your life. It assists you in determining who you are and where you want to go in life. Consider where you want to be at the conclusion of the year. Do you enjoy the industry in which you work? What are you interested in learning more about? In order to analyze your status and goals, career planning and development is a vital procedure for continuous growth and learning. Knowing your objective is vital, but knowing how to get there is even better. If you are looking for assistance with career planning and development.

Keywords: 

Career Management, Goals, Concept, Networking, life-long learning

Outcomes: Table of contents

After undergoing this article you will be able to understand the following:

What is a career?

What is Career Planning?

What is a career goal?

What is a career plan?

Types of career path

Why is career planning important?

Objectives of career planning

Benefits of career planning 

Difference between job and career

Components in career planning

Career Planning Process

Career Planning Pro Tips

Introduction: What is a career?

A career is the variety of experiences that you have undertaken throughout your life. As you gain more experience in the worlds of work and life, you are building your career. Your career path takes account of your education, training and paid or unpaid work. 

It also includes your family and life roles, activities, volunteer work, community involvement and more.

What is Career Planning?

Career planning is a process of identifying the professional path that would suit your personality, interests and goals. It involves exploring different career options, performing a self-evaluation to test your suitability for these and finding the right ways to get on a career track. For instance, you can find out which educational qualifications you would need for your career, what type of training you can take and what professional opportunities might be available to you later.

If you are already in a career that you like, you can use the career planning process to set short-term and long-term goals for what you want to achieve in the next five, 10 or 20 years. You can also evaluate your options and decide to take a new career direction.

What is a career goal?

Career goals are specific milestones that you can to achieve in your career journey to aid in your professional development. The milestones that you have set are aligned with your chosen profession.

There are several aspects to establishing a career goal. You’ll learn a bit more about that later, but to summarize it, establishing career goals involves:

• Identifying what skills or experiences you have now that are requisite to your current role.
• Researching where you want to be in the future.
• Identifying any additional skills or experiences that may be required to get there.
• Developing a roadmap that allows you to reach those goals in a timely and calculated way.

What is a career plan?

A career plan lists short- and long-term career goals and the actions you can take to achieve them. Career plans can help you make decisions about what classes to take, and identify the extracurricular activities, research, and internships that will make you a strong job candidate. 

Below are some helpful steps to guide you in creating a career plan customized to your interests and ambitions.

Types of career path

Career paths have historically focused on upward mobility within a particular occupation. One of four types of career paths may be used: traditional, network, lateral, and dual. 

a. Traditional Career Path—

An employee progresses vertically upward in the organization from one specific job to the next.

b. Network Career Path—

A method of career pathing that contains both a vertical sequence of jobs and a series of horizontal opportunities.

c. Lateral Skill Path—

Traditionally, a career path was viewed as moving upward to higher levels of management in the organization. The availability of the previous two options has diminished considerably in recent years. But this does not mean that an individual has to remain in the same job for life. There are often lateral moves within the firm that can be taken to allow an employee to become revitalized and find new challenges.

d. Dual-Career Path— 

A career-path method, that recognizes that technical specialists can and should be allowed to continue to contribute their expertise to a company without having to become managers. 

Why is career planning important?

Career planning is a crucial part of getting ahead in life. It helps you to decide what you want to do, how and when you want to do it. It's important for career planning to be done on a regular basis and not just when things are going well. This is because there are always new opportunities that come up that might not have been on your radar before. The key thing about having a career plan is that it gives you something concrete and tangible to work towards - something that will keep your motivation up as well as give you direction.

1. Planning your career allows you to have time for your constant personal evaluation

   Other than during your annual review, how frequently do you genuinely take the time to consider your professional development? Your strengths, weaknesses, values, and what you want and need from a profession are all taken into account in a solid career plan. Therefore, now is a good time for you to think about what you have to offer the world or maybe your future employers, how your career path fits with your life, and how you might improve personally and professionally.

2. Planning your career serves as a route for the future

   Planning your career gives you all the information you need to find your specific path to your ultimate career goal. One thing you may want to consider is thinking about an end goal that you would like to achieve. Once you know what that goal is, it will be easier for you to determine how close or far away you are from attaining it. You can find the qualifications required for a job by looking at the job posting or other information on company websites. You can also try to meet people through networking events and you should research other businesses in your industry by asking around and observing how they operate and what their shortcomings are.

3. Planning your career offers much-needed inspiration and direction

   It's possible that your job path won't go in a straight line, but that doesn't mean you should be afraid of it. It will lead you to all kinds of exciting opportunities and interest points. Take your time before making a decision on what you want and where you want to be. When your work path takes unexpected turns, it can be hard to keep going. However, starting to strategize for your future can help you stay motivated, so don't be afraid to plan! Most significantly, it will help you make decisions when you are thinking about changing your industry or profession by assisting you in determining whether your choice actually fits the strategy.

Objectives of career planning

The major objectives of career planning are as follows:

• To identify positive characteristics of the employees.
• To develop awareness of each employee’s uniqueness.
• To respect feelings of other employees.
• To attract talented employees to the organization.
• To train employees towards team-building skills.
• To create healthy ways of dealing with conflicts, emotions, and stress.

Benefits of career planning 

Career planning is a systematic process of setting goals and objectives that help you analyze your successful career. It can be a short or long term process that follows a series of steps. Career planning has many advantages for individuals. It is organized and is set on the individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

Few significant benefits of career planning are:

• To be aware of career opportunities and priorities
• To choose a career preferable for their durability, lifestyle
• Helps the organization identify the individual’s strength
• Increased job satisfaction

Difference between job and career

The differences between Job and Career are the following:

Comparison Chart for differences between Job and Career 

BASIS FOR COMPARISON	JOB	CAREER
Meaning	A job is an activity or task performed by an individual to earn livelihood.	A career can be defined as a journey of a work life of an individual.
What is it?	Trip	Journey
Exchange of	Time for money.	Time for pursuing your lifelong ambition.
Concept	A means to fulfill the needs.	An end in itself.
Duration	Short term	Long term
Requires	Education and other skills.	Training in specific field.
Focus on	Regular income and job safety	Innovation, learning more, taking risks.

Components in career planning

The career management process embraces various concepts: 

Self-awareness, 

career development planning/career exploration, life-long learning, and networking.

Self-Awareness

Look at yourself to discover your interests, skills, personality traits, and values. You can start by asking yourself the following questions: 

Who are you?

What interests you?

What do you like to do?

What are you good at doing?

What do you value, what's important to you?

What are your special assets, skills, and abilities?

Who needs the talents, skills, and abilities you can provide?

What work environment and/or arrangements make sense for you?

What activities do I find fun, motivating, interesting, and enjoyable?

What skills do you need to acquire to develop and manage your career?

What personal style or characteristics do I have that are important to me in the work place?

Also ask friends, family members, co-workers, professors, or mentors if they see the same qualities in you as you see in yourself.

Career Development Planning/Career Exploration

Career Development Planning is a process designed to help you to:

Take the time to think about your job/career goals

Focus on developing knowledge and skills for your current position and for future job opportunities

Think about how you can utilize efficiently your strengths, talents, experience, and motivation – how can you use all of these aspects to increase your passion for work!

Be the architect of your own career development plan – write your goals, make a decision to have a plan for your career development

Discuss your career development goals with your manager

Once you have made a career decision, you need to plan how you will carry out that decision. A career plan provides vision, structure, direction, and motivation for your career management process.

What do you think of Career Development Planning?

Usually, when we think of career management, we think of the goals or action items that we feel we need to do to move our careers forward. Often, we carry these thoughts around in our heads for long periods of time without ever writing them down. If we do write down our goals, they often take the form of a list and many times we lose motivation after writing our goals down, misplace the list, and attain only some of our goals. That is why this method of thinking and just writing your career goals is not a very motivating or reinforcing process!

It is far more effective, motivating, and productive to think of career planning as a process that allows us to envision our future careers and then provides us a path to follow in attaining our goals and realizing our dreams. Career planning is definitely not something that happens once or twice in one’s career. By the contrary, it is a recurring process of taking the time to assess one’s identity, setting new goals, creating new career horizons, and celebrating successes as one develops and becomes more knowledgeable and skilled.

You can use the Individual Career Development Plan template to start your planning process.

Life-long Learning

Are you surprised to know how much of the daily work is now based around technology? Computers, smart phones, tablets and other technological devices have drastically affected the way in which we conduct work. The consequences of these advancements and innovations will quickly reflect through the economy, affecting many industries and catapulting others into the limelight. It is clearly up to you to be able to adapt to these ongoing innovations which will be directly related to how current you keep your knowledge and skills. You need to consider how to vary your learning investments in time, energy and resources. Examples may include: credentialed coursework, certificate programs (related to your career/interest), joining cutting edge projects/committees/task forces, attending conferences, or simply staying current in professional reading.

Networking

As we have moved to an information, service and technological-oriented economy, our networking relationships have become essential assets. These relationships will be the source of information about how emerging fields and industries are evolving. In addition, personal and professional relationships will transcend specific companies, communities, and industries. Our ability to interact, respond and connect in our relationships will directly impact our present performance and future career opportunities.

Remember that keeping connected and knowing how to build good relationships are more important than ever before. These skills can be developed in applied communication courses, contact management software, effective listening and your authentic desire to know more people. 

Career Planning Process

There are  six Steps for Career Planning. They are as follows:

Step 1: Explore Career Options

Use career assessment tools to explore fields further so that you can better utilize guidance from our career staff. This stage helps make you aware of the many possibilities that exist. In addition to learning position titles, you will also discover the skills, educational requirements, and personal attributes needed to be successful in various fields. Gathering this information helps career counselors make suggestions for majors, jobs, and careers that would fit in with your interests and skills. The goal here is to come up with a few options to share with a career counselor.

Step 2: Conduct Field Research

This stage is useful in deciding between different fields to pursue. What better way to explore career options than to meet with someone working in the field? It entails meeting with people in different positions or industries that you are interested in and asking them questions about their job. This is also the first step in starting to build a professional network. To help you with this stage, pick up a packet in the Career Center on Field Research and Informational Interviews.

Step 3: Determine Your Job Target

After you have looked at your options by doing career exploration and field research, it is time to make a decision and set some goals. The components of this decision are called your Job Target. Your Job Target is the specific industry and position you choose to pursue. It may also include geographic location. Your Job Target can change as you gain more experience and knowledge about yourself.

Step 4: Build Your Credentials and Resume

This stage is ongoing and the more you build your credentials, the better your resume becomes. A great resume leads to interviews and offers. The best ways to build your credentials and knowledge are by:

Doing internships related to your Job Target

Taking classes and attending seminars related to your Job Target

Reading books, journals, and magazines related to your Job Target

Joining professional associations or clubs on campus related to your Job Target

Upload your resume at CLUpostings.com so employers can view it.

Step 5: Prepare for Your Job Search

This stage requires researching companies and organizations you want to work for and establishing if your friends, family, or the Career Center have any leads there. Learn to write calling scripts and develop tactics for approaching employers other than looking at advertisements (which seldom bring quick results). You will also need to get organized by starting a job search binder where all your activities are logged and new information is kept. In addition, it is crucial to educate yourself regarding interviewing and salary negotiations before you meet employers. (Our workshops are a great way to do this.) You have to stand out! It will take most new graduates 3–10 months to find a job, so start early. For a graduate-level student, it may take longer.

Step 6: Launch Your Job Search

Ready? There are many activities involved in launching your job search. Writing a targeted resume is important to show employers how your skills relate to their specific needs. Set aside the time to make calls, write cover letters and thank you letters, conduct interviews, and do research. Be creative with the approaches you use and remember to ask yourself, "Will this help me to stand out from my competition?" Lastly, consistently update your resume with any new skills, knowledge, and experience.

Career Planning Tips and strategies

We suggest you to adopt the following 14 career planning tips and strategies:

1. Know your income goal before embarking on a job search. 
2. Write an attention-getting resume. 
3. Explore what types of working environments interest you. 
4. Research salary information online.
5. Always research promotions. 
6. Determine your eligibility for tuition reimbursement or student loan forgiveness.
7. Research salary information online
8. Identify transferable skills
9. Always research promotions
10. Don't let money be your only motivation
11. Research job training programs for adults
12. Determine your eligibility for tuition reimbursement or student loan forgiveness
13. Research future industry projections
14. Don't compare yourself to others

Conclusions 

In a dynamic and ever-evolving world of work, strategic career planning has become indispensable. Even if you’re in a stable job, charting a career roadmap is essential if you’re seeking progression in your professional journey – and we don’t mean just a bump in your salary, either. 

A bigger salary is always welcome, but it’s important to realise that career growth is not merely measured by a fatter paycheque; it’s about holistic growth and a sense of accomplishment that goes beyond numbers.

Your career plan should outline how you'll get to where you want to be, what actions are needed and when, and separated into your short, medium and long-term goals. Constantly review your progress, especially after each short-term goal is reached.

You must also establish a backup career development plan, in case your situation changes. Map several alternative paths to your long-term goal, considering how you'll overcome the types of problems you might encounter - such as training requirements - at each step.

Your first short-term goal may involve improving your CV and cover letter. Other short or medium-term targets could include undertaking relevant internships, gaining volunteering experience or attending careers fairs.

Finally, don't forget that career planning is a continuous process. Revisit and review your aims and objectives throughout your career, and don't feel constrained by the goals you've set - the structure of a career plan should help you clearly map out the route to trying something new.