Career Management: Career Planning
Development planning is a process designed to help you to:
- Think through your job/career goals
- Focus on developing knowledge and skills for your current position and for future job opportunities
- Think about how to better utilize your strengths, talents, experience, and passion in your work
- Write up your own career development plan
- Discuss your development goals with your manager
After you have made a career decision, it is time to plan how you will carry out that decision. A career plan provides vision, structure, direction, and motivation for your career development process.
When we think of career development planning, we think of the goals or action items that we feel we need to do to move our careers forward. We often carry these thoughts around in our heads for months, years, or decades 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 momentum after writing our goals down, misplace the list, and accomplish only some of our goals. This is not a very motivating or positively reinforcing process!
It is far more effective and productive to think of career planning as a process that allows us to visualize our future careers and then provides us a roadmap to follow in realizing our dreams. Career planning is not something that happens once or twice in one’s career; rather, it is a continual process of assessing one’s career identity, setting new learning goals, creating new career visions, and celebrating accomplishments as one develops and becomes more skilled.
Attend the Taking Action workshop on campus to get a full experience of how the career development planning process can help you move forward in your career. As a template, use the Individual Career Development Plan to start your planning process.
