Your Career shouldn't happen to you, IT should happen for you
Proactive Planning for career progression
Your career shouldn’t happen TO you, it should happen FOR you!
When I meet with candidates of various levels I always ask, what is their career plan? Or, what is the 3-5 year plan for their career?
For the best part they know what they want to become in terms of their career. However, typically they are never sure how to get there or gain the experience required for the new position.
Below I have included a simple process that I run through with candidates to help them start proactively planning for that next role.
The first step is the hardest, which is knowing undeniably what you want to become. I can’t help with this part, it’s down to you.
The only advice I would give is make sure that the right motives are behind your decision, wanting to progress purely for monetary gain is not the best motive. Moving for challenge, fulfilment or happiness would be the better motives to look at.
That’s just my opinion.
So now you know what you want, the next step is devilishly simple.
What you need to do now is get 2-3 job description’s that are under your now desired position, most likely from the internet.
Now look through the key skills and responsibilities of the job descriptions and write them down. Then split them into two headings – “Things I have already done/can do” and “Things I haven’t done yet.”
The heading “Things I haven’t done” is now our list of goals that we need to achieve so we can reach our main goal of the new position.
I would then split them into short, mid and long term goals - get the easy wins out of the way and work on getting involved in the other areas.
Some of them you may not be able to complete as your current role and confinements would not allow you too.
The answer to this problem has two possibilities:
- If you have a good working relationship with your Manager / Leader* and assuming you are currently fulfilling your day job, it wouldn’t hurt sitting down with them and asking them for more responsibility and orienteer this around the goals you want to get involved in.
*Remember a good Manager / Leader understands the art of delegation and challenge for their team, so majority of the time they wouldn’t mind releasing some more responsibility to you.
- If you don’t feel comfortable speaking with you Manager / Leader in regards to getting more responsibility, then I would look at areas that you can get involved in that are linkable or similar to the goals that you wish to achieve.
Depending on how many items sit on the “Things I haven’t done” list will dictate roughly how long to set your goal for, It’s not a quick fix!
Remember, you need tangible experience in the area to hold the best chance of getting that new position, I would say a minimum of 6 months commercial experience in the “Things I haven’t done” column before you can say that you have undeniably achieved it.
So look at your list and what you need to achieve and set yourself a realistic time line to have accomplished that next step, otherwise it’s too easy to put things off.
It’s that simple.
My last piece of advice would be to keep a diary of how you are getting on versus each goal. This will not only help you revise and draw back on experience later on down the line but it will help you track you own progress.