Right career planning can put you on the right track
A planned and smooth beginning makes a perfect end. Career planning is synonymous to socially and financially secure life. Career planning must start during the final years of high school but most of the students think it is too early to think about career and after graduation, they find it quite difficult to give their careers a meaningful shape. What can you achieve in life that can be self-fulfilling and that can enhance your self-esteem are the two pillars of your career planning.
Steps to infallible career planning
Career planning is a process. There are four basic steps that you should follow to create an infallible career planning:
Step 1: Purpose of your life, current position, and assessment about yourself.
Step 2: Explore your resources, gaps, and requirements
Step 3: Decision Making
Step 4: Implementation
There are several aspects in each of these steps that you need to consider. Let’s now discuss all these steps one by one:
Purpose of your life, current position, and assessment about yourself
The first step in career planning is to know about your strengths and weaknesses, what achievements you think will make you satisfied, and what is your current position. So there are two aspects that you need to consider:
- What is your current position?
- Where you want to see yourself after 10-15 years from now?
Once you sit with paper and pencil and get the answers to these questions, the purpose of your life will be clear to you.
Explore your resources, gaps, and requirements
Once you are clear about your targets career planning becomes easier. However, in this context, you should be clear about the feasibility of the targets. You shouldn’t make unrealistic targets. You now need to ask yourself the following questions. The proper answer to these questions will make your destination visible and realistic:
- What resources do I have that will help me to achieve my career goals?
- Are these resources sufficient to achieve my career goals?
- What other resources do I need to fulfill my dream?
- What are my weaker areas that need special attention?
- What are my strengths are these strengths sufficient or I need to create some other stronger areas?
Answering these questions will make your current position, drawbacks, and requirements clear. This is the most authentic way towards comprehensive and pragmatic career planning. At this stage, you can perform a SWOT analysis to get an in-depth insight into all your current and future requirements and gaps.
Decision making
You now know your current position and your future requirements. The weaknesses and strengths are also clear to you. So, this is the time when you should take firm decisions on certain aspects of your career. Remember, the decisions you take now have far-reaching consequences in your life. Start asking yourself and getting an answer to the following questions:
- What should I do next to be more eligible and target-oriented?
- How can I accumulate all the resources?
- What hindrances can come in the future?
- What options do I have and which one is the best of them?
- What should I do if the selected option fails?
These will help you make a concrete decision and plan accordingly.
Implementation
This is the final stage of career planning. As the targets are clear, strengths and weaknesses are known, and you have to make decisions what you will do to get to your targets your job is now to plan for the implementation. In fact, implementation is itself a process. First of all, you have to know the following:
- What actions and steps will materialize your decisions?
- What kinds of help do you require?
- Who can help you in this matter?
In this last stage, you will find several hindrances. You have to overcome them through hard work, proper planning, and proper utilization of resources.
If you can start your career planning before the end of your high school final examination, your planning will be more successful in the future. You will be able to plan your undergraduate and postgraduate studies accordingly. Above all, your dreams will be fulfilled and careers will be more secured.
