Career Planning
Most people change careers at least two times over the course of their life. How successful your transition among careers will be can be to a large extent attributed to the amount of career planning and preparation you have done.
CAREER PLANNING EXCERSISE QUESTIONS
Outlined below are some questions that may be used as a guide to help you establish a comprehensive view of your current situation, sumarise your capabilities and ambitions – and to identify your ideal position.
Am I Seeking Change or Challenge?
The reasons why you are looking for a new job are very important in order to work out your ideal position. Firstly, you need to establish how satisfied you were in your current position. Are you looking to take the next step in your career, ie to stretch and develop your skills, or are you seeking to move on to a whole new area.
What am I good at?
Identify the main skill areas in which you excel and back each up with examples from your working life. This exercise will help you summarise your experience and skills; using examples will help you think through where your skills really lie.
What do I enjoy?
Look back at past experiences and achievements at work, and outline the basic working environments and styles which suit you. Again, try to think in terms of examples in order to think through aspects of your past and present employment.
Analysis of my Current Job Situation
Think about your current role, and create a list of the hights and lows of the role for your future reference. Then create a similar summary of the problems and opportunities you can identify with your current role.
The objective of this exercise is to capture any problems faced in your current role and to clarify what opportunities for further development you may have.
Actions to Develop my Current Job Situation
You can develop a simple matrix drawing on the highs / lows and problems / opportunities in the current job that you have identified above. Using this matrix you can identify some action points to develop your current role.
Analysis of my Career
The next thing you may want to do is to generate actions to build on current capabilities and environment, with a focus on developing your future career.
Exercises in this area help you to work through the decisions which will be important to them in determining their next career move, including working environment, lifestyle and job options.
My Lifestyle Preferences
Take a high-level view of things that compete for your time. Consider how much time you dedicate to each of the things you identified. List them in the order of priorities. Is there enough time for you to do all the things that are important to you? If not what are the things that you are prepared to leave out? Or dedicate less time to?
My Work Preferences
What environment are you happiest working in? In answering this question, you should cover areas such as team and individual work, home and abroad, levels of responsibility, working hours and styles.
Evaluating my Career Options
List the key attributes which will be important to you as your career progresses (these can include environment, skills used, work-life balance, style of work etc). List your career development options (such as a change of department / field) taht you can identify. Considering your answers to the previous questions, try to rank each career option in term of how they fulfill the requiremetns you are looking for.
The objective of this excercise is to narrow down a range of possible career directions you can take.
Skills and Competencies Analysis
The next thing you need to do is to evaluate your current skills and competencies and match them against the skills and competencies that are required for your deisred career(s). Identify any gaps in skills or competencies you may have. This can be a starting point for your to research your options on developing those skills. Click here for more information on how to obtain the necessary skills and qualifications.