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Career development planning, Job Options and Requirements
Career development information or career planning guide is required for two main aspects:
- Finding the right and sustainable job.
- Measuring the process of your Career development.
In this time of globalization; emerging trend of technologies and increasing work experience are meant to contribute to an individual’s career growth. Career development though depends widely on the economic situations; we are witness to situations where skilled professionals or people with enhanced employability skills are able to find great career advancement opportunities.
Planning and choosing a career wisely; plays a very vital role in both, personal and professional life of an individual.
As a first step towards planning a career you need to seek appropriate career information and select a option that matches your skills, interests and of course helps you fund your requirements. Post accomplishing the academic qualification one needs to find a work place which will serve to be a stepping stone to a successful career.
An individual should learn to go with the flow and still stay unique in crowd; this is what will get him a successful career. career search and Career planning resources include sequence of activities such as Educational, Physical, Psychological, sociological and economic factors. Planning a Career development is helpful to both; the one who is looking for a job and the once who are currently employed and waiting to attain success.
One should always try and keep pace with the technological advancements because job environment is changing rapidly and there is cut throat competition with high skilled resourceful individuals. Student’s mentality of great passion to learn and apply new concepts would help them to stay in tune with tomorrow. Being optimistic about potentials and abilities to reach the desired heights of career becomes mandatory.
Achieving career growth through career assessments is not an overnight process; a lot of hard work, dedication and patience go in to the process.
Forecasted but Real:
Planning your career plans often include forecast; especially in career’s early times.Forecasting
Individuals may select an option but later change their minds. This is advantageous, especially for those who consider specialisation for a career plan and keeping their options open.
It is viable, for example, a fresh graduate nurse will have a career plan; which is clear that the choice at that point is “I am not aware of better or other options and need a variety of options to think over again” or “I am interested in these three or four options, and I’d like to gain experience in it first”
Keeping it real:
The early stages of a career it makes sense to keep options open and look at a variety of training and experience options for future proofing reasons, however; after the early stages, extreme care needs to be taken to make sure that one is not picking up random careers just because they sound interesting.
Career Planning - A four step process
Career management planning factors may vary from profession to profession. However; most basic four steps can be summarised as:
- Self assessment
- Explore opportunities
- Making choices
- Making it happen.
Professionals who are also supervisors, leaders, educators, Career development specialist, or experienced in a particular field will play a crucial role in the third and fourth aspects of the career plan: making choices and making things happen.
1. Self Assessment
Individual needs to develop a clear vision of Values, strengths, needs and aspirations: Focus on:- Which aspects of the profession they enjoy and which they don’t like much.
- Identifying interests, motivators, skills, values and personality types.
- Extent to which the current or future role meets the aspiring individuals needs.
- Existence of preferences and priorities accompanied with time line pressures.
- Identifying appropriate and adequate development needs.
- Identifying education and career guidance needs.
2. Explore Opportunities
Individuals need to research options available and the career pathways to achieve the option. Focus on:- Fresh graduates shall start seeking graduate student Career development plans leading them towards on-campus student employment opportunities.
- Looking out for the relative fundamentals and necessary prerequisites for each option.
- Speaking to professionals who have been employed in various fields.
- Feedback from mentors, colleagues, career advisors and professional leaders.
- For each option; beneficial training, on job trainings, job experiences, and the reality check on feasibility of these aspects.
- Keeping more than one option Identified.
3. Make Choices
Make choice considering suitable options and matching what the individual would like to do and what Career development and job market demands. Spotlight should be on:- Considering individual’s statistics and identifying areas of growth.
- Keeping in mind factors of competition and availability of selected options.
- Strategy to overcome obstacles or barriers.
- Keeping in mind aspects involved to pursue each option and is the individual ready for it.
4. Make it Happen
Making it happen; individual’s involvement with a course of action. Things to work through include:- Record your plan of action
- Reviewing action steps which may be additional training, enhancing useful experience or evolving a special technical skill
- Execution of the plan
- Checks and balances of the plan
An Excellent Career development plan will:
Record relevant details from “Self assessment”, “Exploring opportunities” and “Making choices”
Specify an agreed (between an individual and the mentor or supervisor) plan of action covering:
- Skills that need to be developed by the individual.
- Required Qualifications and deep investigating careers as a sure shot option.
- Enhanced learning opportunities to attain agreed goals.
- List of “stepping stone” jobs with employee job development plans.
- Experiences that might turn out to be very useful.
- Strategies to overcome obstacles; if any.
- Goals are achieved through Network and Information of the specific field.
- Regular reviewing the plan at pre decided junctures of circumstances, stages of progress.