How to Plan for a Career

In order to find out your most suitable career it will be worth doing Career Planning.  You have to do some introspection on your sources of motivation as the first step. There may be a lot of careers that might appear suitable to you matching the skills and knowledge you have already acquired. You may have been attracted to certain careers as they appeared to be highly appealing to your senses. But this does not necessarily indicate the most suitable career for you as your skill sets may not fit in with the demand.

You may sit with a pen and paper and list out your personal interests and what all things you expect from a career. Once you have completed doing this, you will get a rough sketch of your ideal job. Many jobs become parts of a career and many careers have the same jobs as their integral parts. Your ideal job should match with one of those careers. Find out which career is more related to your ideal job.

How to start Career Planning

Many people end up in miserable careers as they did not have a plan about their careers. You must remember that once you have already selected a career and have already worked your way up for a certain time only to find that the chosen field was not suitable to your interests and expectations, you may not be able to flourish in another career easily. This means that you must be careful while choosing your career. A cautiously worked out career plan will help you to eliminate possibilities of dissatisfaction.

It would be good to consider the following points during the initial stages of career planning:

• The academic qualification that you already have
• The course that you are studying now
• Your work experience in any field, part-time, full time, or as part of your family business
• Your extracurricular activities during college days
• Your hobbies and other personal interests
• Your experience that interested you during social activities

Once you have completed this list, take the points one by one and put them for a deep thought. Then you try answering the following questions honestly.

• Why did you do that?
• Which part of that work/study you enjoyed the most?
• Which part of that work/study you really found boring or useless?
• What was the challenging aspect of that study or work?
• What did you really contribute during that work/ study?
• Which aspect of that study/ work earned you your teacher’s or colleagues’ good remark?

Did you finish answering all these questions?

Now you may just read what you have written as answers to the questions and you will find that a certain pattern has evolved around a particular kind of work that employs your skills and interests. This should invariably form the basis of the careers range that you are most likely to enjoy.

Pinpointing the Exact Career of Choice

By now you have laid the foundation to your career planning. Yet you have not arrived at a choice that would suit you the most. So the next step is browsing through the various career profiles available in your country of choice. Various industries involve numerous careers and each career path has a certain profile that consists of varying requirements and attractions.

You should be able to flag your career line by matching with the career profiles that will be included in this section of the Maxnewsonline.com

Career Advice

The selection of your best suitable career from such a broad spectrum of careers could be sometimes a difficult task for most people. You can seek advice from of a career specialist who may help focus on what you are looking from a career and work out strategies on how to get where you would like to be.

Points to Ponder

By now you may have arrived at a point where you are almost sure of your career choice. Just having an idea or a plan may not bring you the exact details of the work you are going to do to build your successful career. For this you will need to consider certain issues related to each job before putting your plan into action.

There are practical issues like salary, work environments, safety at work, possible discriminations, stock market fluctuations, country specific issues, family relocation difficulties, job market, and many others. You may also require skill upgrading and updating and sometimes extra qualifications that become essential to get hired at that given time.

There is stiff competition in most of the careers in the job market. Careers like modelling, anchoring, film direction, journalism, politics etc. always demand lot of paid or unpaid work experience. While choosing such glamorous careers you must keep in mind you may have to do really hard work to progress. You may also consider career progression options in the selected field or a related field. Sometimes you may require additional qualifications to progress. Are you prepared to go back to a college for this?