Making Your New Career Plan
Given that the world of work changes so rapidly, without the underpinning of carefully thought-out strategies and tactics, any career plan is bound to take you to more than a few dead ends. Now it’s time to create your plan, geared to your lifestyle, career, career plans, and life goals. The strategies and tactics in this guide will help keep you focused on your career plan as well as give you flexibility when things take a turn you didn’t expect.
Make a Personal Mission Statement
First, you need to write out your mission statement for your career. Let’s agree that for the purpose of your mission statement, you exist to maximize your human as well as your economic potential.
You should include in your mission statement an idea of your overarching personal philosophy of work as it relates to you directly and as it might relate to your vision of your future. As concerned as you might be about some of the troubles of the world, stick to yourself for this. Don’t get windy and eloquent. Shoot for a half page, but you will be making a big mistake if you go beyond one page of double-spaced typing.
Set Up Your Own SWOT Team
Next, you need to take a look at your SWOT—Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The purpose of this is to provide a baseline for future improvement in your life and work. When you begin to examine what you enter about yourself under each of these headings, the key elements for your strategic plan will become fairly obvious. The number you may arrive at by doing a formal SWOT analysis is sort of like knowing your IQ. It just doesn’t make all that much difference; you probably already know about how smart you are and where you might come up short. Lets look at each element individually.
- Strengths Your strengths are what set you above others. Coming up with these factors requires more than an ego trip. It requires that you face yourself in a way that may not be comfortable for you. To have any value in your career plan, you must compare apples with apples. You may be way ahead of all those with whom you might be competing for a promotion on your ability to do a market analysis. But if your job spec doesn’t involve market analysis, it’s not a strength in terms of your career planning.
- Weaknesses Your weaknesses, like your strengths, must be directly relevant to the work you are doing or would like to do. Think of your weaknesses in terms of where you might be vulnerable in a competitive situation.
- Opportunities Opportunities are most readily defined by the need for people with your skills and experience, and the openings that exist for people with your talents. Occupations, professions, and job titles are in constant flux based on any number of factors. The economy in general, the relative strength of your field, the local supply of people who want the same job, and many other factors. Remember that obvious opportunities will draw a lot of competitive bidding. If you’re smart, you will use the data to which you have access to try to project when there will be a need for your skills before the market catches on. It’s a cliché, but planning ahead makes good sense when you plan your career.
- Threats The most common threats that will make it more difficult for you to get promoted or to get the job you want could include everything from a general slowdown of the economy to the sudden appearance of something that threatens to make you redundant, or worse, obsolete. Pay attention only to those elements that are directly and immediately relevant to your career planning. All the other stuff does nothing more than sap your energy and attention.
By reviewing your plan on a regular basis, you can create benchmarks that will give you a clear picture of your progress. I usually suggest that you benchmark your own progress as well as events in your work life that have both direct and indirect effects on your career.
Set Your Goals
Establish your strategic goals as tools to help you bridge the gaps that exist between where you currently stand and the objectives you have described in your mission statement. In a very real sense, you should see your goals as action plans that identify the minimum standards that will be acceptable to achieve the progress you are seeking.
Your real problem is whether to set easy or difficult goals for yourself. Accomplishing a bunch of easy goals may give you more positive feedback faster than you could get from having difficulty with a single complex or difficult goal. You have to know yourself and you have to act rationally. In simplest terms, don’t baby yourself, and don’t overburden yourself.
Tactics are the specific steps and actions you will take to move yourself forward. Make sure your tactics are always directly aligned with your mission statement and your long-term career goals. It is extremely easy to be sidetracked by something that seems valid but turns out to take you in a different direction. Office rumors are typically responsible for people allowing themselves to be sidetracked. A rumor of a salary freeze, for example, can be quite intimidating, but don’t alter your strategy until you know all the facts.
As long as you keep asking yourself, “Am I doing the right thing?” you will stay on track. A strategic career plan should regularly put you in positions where you have to make decisions. It should be a burr under your saddle. The world around you moves in unpredictable ways and if your strategic career plan is to be of any real benefit to you, it has to prod you to take action. Your strategic career plan must be adaptive. Its goal is not only to get you where you want to be, but to keep you relevant where you presently are.
Monitor Your Strategic Career Plan
Whether you have chosen to implement your plan in discrete steps or to manage it seamlessly is up to you. However, you should occasionally step back and look at everything that has happened since you last took a look.
It is tempting to think that any plan is on track when you are aware of the planned steps having taken place and you get a sense of productive forward motion. However successful and productive the small steps may be, you may have overlooked some things that add up to problems or a need to change direction. It’s forest-for-the-trees sort of thing. If it helps you, set both short- and long-time goals and guidelines. Get feedback from those to whom you have entrusted your plans. You wouldn’t take a long road trip without checking the map or your position on your GPS device. Do the same with your career plan.
As much as you plan and hope to make the right decisions, you will always make a few bad ones. That’s par for the course and you will be able to change decisions or modify your plan—but remember, you must make decisions! In some cases your collected data will dictate what has to be done, but usually your career decisions will be based on your own insight, judgment, fears, excitement, and whatever other emotions might be involved at the moment.
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Career Advancement by Marc Dorio
