Long-term Career Planning
Why you should make a plan
Do you have your new year’s career success plan written out? If not, let’s review why you may want to get on that:
- Not planning makes you more subject to the whims of others. Right now, your manager and organization have plans for you, and those plans may not align exactly with what you most want to do.
- Planning enables you to think through the pros and cons of multiple career path options instead of passively allowing whatever would otherwise happen to happen.
- Planning helps you come up with the 20% of things you can spend your time on that will make the most difference to your income and career satisfaction.
- Planning helps you see what you need to focus on to overcome the most likely challenges.
- Planning makes it more likely that you will achieve your deepest desires as quickly as possible.
- Planning makes achieving your goals manageable, by going step-by step instead of trying to make everything happen all at once.
How to make a plan
OK, so next, how to make a career success plan?
- Put an hour on your calendar to write a career success plan.
- During this hour, write possible goals to set for the year and the pros and cons of each one if you are not sure.
- Select your top one to three goals.
- For each goal, make it SMART. SMART stands for specific, meaningful, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
- Once you have your goals SMARTened up, make a plan of the steps that need to happen for you to achieve them. You can work backward from achievement if it helps.
- Along with these steps, indicate which ones you may need support to achieve and where you will seek that support.
- Reach out to those who will give you support to get started. Talk to them about your plans and where you might need support from them.
Please keep us at YES Career Coaching & Resume Writing Services in mind as a resource. If you will never sit down and make this plan by yourself, or you prefer to have expert input into it, schedule a Career Strategy Session with our Certified Career Coach Michael Akbar. If you’ll want assistance to make a job search or promotion go as smoothly as possible, we can also help you with that. If you’ve never had a Career Success Consultation with us, you can go to YESwriting.com to request one. If you’ve already had one, please reach out to the client success manager—Jessie or Maggie—with whom you had it to schedule a free Goal Planning Session with them. You can also discuss with your client success manager getting Career Advancement Coaching, either a single session or ongoing ones, with Coach Michael.
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Here's to your success in the new year!