8 Parts to a Successful Career Plan!

This past Friday, in my Leadership Coaching Program, I taught exactly how to build your career development plan and put a time-based calendar together to identify the right skills and optimize your development, practice, and execution of them to get the greatest ROI now and for the rest of your career!

Winners create time to build skills that pay them back.

Non-winners waste time.

Don’t let that be you.

If you want to dial up 2025 and make it your best year yet, why not jump in the program and get not only this great lesson, but also an entire leadership library filled with lessons on ALL the career skills you need to max out your progress and enjoyment?

ACCESS THE REPLAY HERE!

SESSION RECAP

Career planning it’s hard, which means most people won’t do it.

What’s worse, professional development is a maze not taught in school or in companies for that matter.

Enter your beloved Coach who not only figured it all out, but engineered a methodology for you, developed the lessons, teaches them every month, and even wrote a book about it so you can have it all in one place!

If you’re just dying to grab the book, you can get a copy from the retailers or two for the price of one from me. You pick.

Anyhow, to help you master these principles and develop a great success plan, I covered in this session:

• How to build your career plan.
• How to assess where you are on the career spectrum.
• 8 key components that make a successful plan.
• Questions to ask yourself to ensure you’re building the right plan for yourself.
• Deliverables you need to create for each of the 8 components.
• A way to track your progress and adjust.?

Consider, every map has a title, body, scale, legend, and compass to help you make sense of it. They even have insets, a smaller map blown up inside the larger map, to give you a closer view of a particular area.?

Your professional development map needs analogous components so you know where you are at any moment as well as which direction you’re heading. I recommend including 8 components to create the best structure.

A brief overview of the 8 key components ALL successful career plans MUST contain:

Goals: We need to have something to work toward. Goals come in a variety of forms and can include imposed work-related assignments such as a delivering a presentation or a self-imposed objective such as opening your own business. Use these goals to guide your professional development as you identify the skills required to achieve them.

Skills: What are the skills you want to build to become a master of your profession? I’ve identified over 40 skills I believe most professionals need advance and enjoy their careers to the fullest. Your goals will serve as the best clues to know which skills to build.

Lessons: You need detailed instruction on how to effectively build the skills. That includes the steps to develop, practice, evaluate, iterate, and grow them. Lessons can be sessions in my leadership library or come in the form of training and certification courses, manuals, books, or any mediums where you’re learning in an organized fashion.

Tools: As you learn the steps to build each skill, you’ll become more proficient in developing them if you use the proper tools. There will be tools to practice the skills and tools to execute the skill. Reading about how to chop the tree down is one thing. If you don’t have an axe, you won’t be able to practice or complete the act.

Coaches: Getting proper instruction will expedite your growth. Getting the proper instruction from actual gurus will improve your growth exponentially. Your choices in selecting the right experts to follow and invest time with is no less important than the effort you put into developing the skill.?

Calendar: All the intention in the world means nothing if you don’t have the space in your life to do whatever it is you intend to do. We tend to focus on the urgent. Building your skills, especially those that don’t appear immediately necessary or come with a short-term payoff are often pushed to the side. Consistently planning time in your calendar to develop your skills—and sticking to it—will pay tremendous dividends throughout your career.

Tracker: Without recording what you’ve completed, how far you’ve come, or how much further you need to go, you won’t know where you are on your map or how to feel about your progress. This is especially important for your psyche. As we pursue long-term goals, we don’t realize how far we’ve come because our attention is typically on how far we need to go.

Metrics: Improper metrics are a great source of strain for most people. If you’re measuring outcomes, you cannot control or designating target goals without fully understanding the effort and variables required to achieve them, you’ll be susceptible to throwing in the towel. Pick metrics you can control and will give you the truest assessment of your progress.

As you can see from these highlights related to career planning and skill building, there is a lot to get right to put yourself on and keep yourself on the right path!?

If you’re interested in taking that deeper plunge with me, catching the replays, and also enjoying attendance at our monthly Zoom get-togethers, check out the entire Leadership Coaching Program.?

It really will help set you up for a great 2025!

Andy

…put people first, results second.