Building a Career Development Plan: 3 Simple Steps

If thinking about your career gives you crippling existential dread, then this is the article for you. I get it, the future can be scary, especially when you start to ponder how you’re going to put food on your plate for the next 5 to 10 years. This is why building a career development plan can be beneficial to so many people, as it gives you short and long-term goals to anchor your decision making while navigating the jungle that is your career. And today, TeamRecruiter is going to share 3 simple steps that you can take to begin creating your career development plan.?

Self Assessment

The first step in creating any plan is to determine where you are and where you want to go. Do some self-reflection. Find out what your likes are, what your dislikes are. Your strengths, weaknesses, current skills you already have and skills you might want to acquire later on. While you do this, gather some information about yourself from others as well, as our own biases and perspectives tend to skew objectivity. Once you do this, you can begin to consider career paths that will fit you based on your self assessment. The most important tip in this stage is to keep your career options broad and relatively general so as to not pigeonhole yourself into a single career path.

Writing the Plan

Now that you know where you are and have a general idea of where you want to go, the next step is to write it all down. How you do this is totally up to you. It can be in the form of a powerpoint, a whiteboard, journal, sticky notes or any other method that best suits you.

Whichever method you choose, you want to start by writing down the passions and interests you identified in step one, followed by what your career goals are. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious! Picture yourself in your dream job and make that image as vivid as possible. What role are you fulfilling? What company or organization is it? What is fulfilling about the role? What are your tasks? What does it look like? Smell like? What’s the company culture like? Once you answer these questions, write those answers down.

Now, on a different slide or Post-It, it’s time to write down the skills you already have and the ones you want to develop. This will not only further serve as a guide for what tasks to undergo so as to develop the skills you need to, but it will also allow you to do tasks that play to your strengths in order to build confidence.

Slide 3 is going to get into detail on the exact activities that you will undergo in order to reach or further reach the ideal scenario you identified in slide one, and map them out in relation to the time each activity will take. There are plenty of business and project management tools to help you map this out in a visual manner such as the coveted Gantt Chart or others like it. These tasks could range from finishing a university degree, to mentorship and internship programs, to attending more social events to work on your social skills. Anything that may help you either hone the skills you already have, or improve upon the ones you need to as highlighted in slide 2.

Your final slide will include every worst-case scenario that you can come up with and how you may overcome these barriers. At first, this may seem counterproductive as it could lead to a demotivation, but at the same time, this step will help keep you grounded as well provide comfort in the fact that you have a plan in place to face these barriers should you need to. Examples of these barriers could be: Getting laid off from work, not being able to afford the schooling you may need or life developments that require more of your time.

Act, Assess and Adjust

The final step in this process is an ongoing one. While it is important and can be incredibly useful to have a general outline of how you want the next five or ten years of your life to look like, at the end of the day life is unpredictable and dynamic. Other opportunities may come up that can cause you to completely revise the direction you want your career to go in. Or you may realize that your plan was too aggressive or too laid back and you aren’t developing at the pace you may want to. Whatever it may be, the plan you created above needs to be less of a set blueprint, and more like a race car. That is, have the ability to change components that may have once been useful, but overtime became counterproductive or unhelpful.

In conclusion, mapping out the next 5 years of your life really just comes down to a lot of self-reflection, and the willingness to write down concrete steps you can take in order to be the version of yourself that you want to be in the next 5 years. However it is also important not to allow this 5 year plan to give you the illusion of control. The world is a very chaotic and unpredictable place, and there will be so many things within the process of your 5 year plan that will simply be beyond your control. The trick is to react to your surroundings in a way that will turn you into the most ideal version of you. To make choices on a day to day basis that leads you to the person that you want to be. Then and only then, may you find beauty in all the chaos.

References:

MIT Career Advising & Professional Development. (n.d.). Make a career plan. MIT Career Advising & Professional Development. https://capd.mit.edu/resources/make-a-career-plan/

Guarino, A. (2023, September). How to develop a 5-year career plan. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/09/how-to-develop-a-5-year-career-plan

Wharton Online. (2022, April 20). How to create a career development plan. Wharton Online. https://online.wharton.upenn.edu/blog/how-to-create-a-career-development-plan/