Career planning is an individual activity that takes place throughout a person’s working life and is a subset of life planning. Many similar elements influence it, but it focuses on work-related tasks and settings. The process of career planning is continual and sequential. Because humans are complicated, each of us has our own set of objectives, goals, development potential, and limitations.
If you want a profession that fascinates and challenges you, you must plan for it, and the following steps can assist you in doing so:
Step 1: Assess Your Personal Strengths, Weaknesses, and Motivators
Before you do anything else, you should review your own strengths, shortcomings, values and understand what truly motivates you. What do you excel at in your current position? What abilities have enabled you to excel in past roles? In contrast, what are your weakest skills or the most difficult tasks for you?
STEP 2: Determine what inspires you in your job:
- What tasks, projects, or jobs excite you?
- What do you enjoy most about your current job?
- What additional responsibilities would you like to have that you don’t already have?
STEP 3: Identify Potentials and Opportunities
Whether you see them immediately once or not, there may be several prospects for growth and advancement in your firm and current domain. It is up to you to recognise and capitalise on these opportunities. Try to stay current on professional and industry events. People around you can also assist you in identifying opportunities.
For example, an experienced mentor can be quite beneficial to your career, especially if he or she is someone you trust and respect.
STEP 4: Extend your knowledge.
Identify the knowledge, abilities, certificates, or degrees you’ll need to achieve the career you want to hold.
A positive attitude toward your ongoing development is an important skill that can help you advance in your job. One of the habits that can provide benefits and improve your life on a daily basis is the habit of learning every day.
Some of the most significant advantages of self-learning for our careers are:
1) Develops our ability to think creatively.
When we discover new things and apply what we’ve learned to our work, it inspires us to think differently about our day-to-day tasks. The more we learn, the more we connect the dots, and the more creative we become in our workplace.
2) Assists us in outperforming competition
To have an influence and be impactful at work, we must keep our knowledge current and fresh. Today’s  work culture today has become agile, necessitating that people change their attitude in order to deliver good work. Everyday learning by feeding our minds with fresh insights keeps us motivated in our daily work and, more importantly, helps us become a better candidate for our ideal job or promotion.
3) Helps in the development of confidence
The significance of self-assurance cannot be overstated. When we devote time to learning every day, we begin to understand the full scope of our talents, which aids in our professional development. Most significantly, by learning how to gain knowledge about our own abilities and favourable characteristics, we gain a lot more confidence.
So, the essential question is how we might incorporate self-learning into our daily lives. As you may be aware, there are a plethora of educational resources available on the Internet today on virtually any topic you can think of. They come in a variety of forms, such as specialist blogs, dedicated online courses, YouTube videos, infographics, and so on. Developing a practice of consuming concentrated knowledge through these tools is an excellent method to keep your skills in check.
Additional reading references:
About the Author: Divya is a passionate L&D professional at work as Head -L&D with Tavisca, a cxLoyalty Technology Platform (Division of JP Morgan Chase & Co.). Her endeavor is to advocate and promote modern workplace learning and nurturing individuals to acquire skills through the best of conventional and modern learning interventions.
