Career Planning Tips And Advice

Here are five tips to help you make the most out of your career planning efforts.

1. Plan For The Long Run

Where do you see yourself in five years from now? What about in ten years from now? Planning for the long run requires you to sit and think about your desired career. Set objectives and write down the actions you’ll take to achieve your goals. Knowing where you want to be and how to get there will bring you one step closer to seeing your professional dreams come true.

2. Research Your Desired Roles

Think about the next role you’d like to obtain and research it to understand what it involves you to know or do. You can do this research by searching for specific roles on job websites and read the ads for those roles. You should then compare yourself, your skills and your preferred way of working to the job description. Do you need more experience in any particular areas? Do you see yourself doing that job long-term?

Set yourself a goal to fill these gaps within the next year or so, and then proceed to finding the right education to pursue to get there.

3. Read Education Literature

Once you know your areas for improvement, try to see if you can find a book that can help you fill these gaps. You could consider reading a guide or other similar education book on a very narrow topic. you could also read some more generic leadership books, in order to improve your abilities in this area of activity. Try to read as much as you can, but make sure you stick to the areas of expertise your desired job entails.

4. Seek For Guidance

Petroplan advises that mentoring can help you achieve your goals much faster. An expert in your niche or industry can help you understand how things work and can provide you with actionable feedback to help you become better and better. This mentor can be a leader you used to work for or one of your former colleagues. Just search for people on Twitter or LinkedIn and identify those who can serve as your mentors. Ask them nicely if they would be interested in taking this role.

5. Develop A Project

Think of a specific project you could try your hand at in order to acquire some experience. This can be anything, from a training course to a project aimed at helping children improve specific skills and abilities. Do your research during the holidays. Ask the parents what kind of projects they would be interested in. Prepare the background, write your project outline and get ready to implement it by the beginning of the next term. In order to improve your odds of success, ask one of the leaders in your school if they would like to run your project. Even if they say no, you’d still gain something. They would surely notice you, so they may invite you to cooperate with them on some of their actual projects. This is something that can also help you improve.