For Successful Career Planning, one should understand its procedure and importance to achieve the most beneficial results.
“The future depends on what you do today.” — Mahatma Gandhi
The process of planning, identifying, and evaluating your career path is known as career planning. Career planning is the process by which one strives to reach a position in the long-term, that is, in the next 5,10, and even 15 years from where one is, at the moment. It involves finding out the right opportunities and goals and how they can be achieved by discovering the various interests, professions, and passions involved in the same process.
A person gets to develop a self-concept, which means that he gets an idea of his own self, derived from the perceptions and ideas he holds about himself, and others’ perception of him. The various career options should be analyzed carefully in order to find a fit between a person’s interests and the long-term job opportunities available to him. It defines the means to achieve the goals set in the long-term.
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” — Stephen Covey
The importance of Career Planning
- FUTURISTIC PLANNING:
Career Planning provides a clear-cut view of the future: It helps one understand what one is looking for in the future, passion, interests, matching skills, etc.
- GOAL ORIENTED:
Career Planning helps the person identify what he needs to do to bridge the gap between what he knows and what he needs to know to achieve his goals. If he doesn’t plan his career early, he will have a hard time finding out what he needs to do to upgrade his status in his workplace/organization.
- SELF EVALUATION:
Career planning motivates the individual to pursue various courses to understand his strengths and weaknesses, intelligence, emotional IQ, technical skills. This would allow him to choose the right career path.
- TIME-SAVING:
Career Planning leads to optimum utilization of the most valued resource in this world, “time”. People cannot afford to waste a lot of time searching for jobs based on their interests after finding out that they don’t fit the job profile, just because they didn’t upgrade their knowledge and skills earlier, say 9-10 years back. It is just an excuse for not utilizing the time properly when opportunities to learn more knocked at their doors, and they were in a position to do their career planning. Yet, if they didn’t do it properly, they’re the ones who would find it difficult to move up in their career, clinging on to their traditional jobs for equal or lesser pay.
- PREPARATION TIME:
A person who wishes to pursue a course in a well-reputed college needs time to prepare for the entrance exams and interviews, in order to get into the institution.
Thus, the earlier the person plans for his career, the higher are the chances for a favorable outcome to happen. This helps him to build a good profile as well.
The stages involved in the Career Planning process
Assessment stage: The person is unaware of his strengths, weaknesses, matching skills, etc. He would look for career counseling sessions, preferably one-on-one sessions, to determine his implicit qualities and interests and what would suit him. He would take up various aptitude tests, skill tests, and other psychometric tests to identify his interests.
Investigation stage: The person is confused about which goal he has to set from a wide variety of options in the respective field. For example, Chemical engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Automobile Engineering, etc., are components of the Engineering field. The person asks the graduates/professionals questions in the mentioned fields and tries to figure out which one is best suited for him.
Learning is there in each and every part of the career planning process. There might be a chance that the person might’ve been unaware of some job or course, because of which he or she might have planned his career in a different way. To avoid this, it is very important that he looks into each and every minute detail in the fields in which he or she is interested.
Preparation Stage: The person gets ready to gain experience and knowledge in the field chosen, and he sets his personal goals in the meantime. He puts a success-oriented strategy to get the best out of it.
Commitment Stage: The person has now identified what he wants to do in his career; hence he now looks for jobs, and this process is called “Job Search”. He then negotiates and accepts a job offer from a company to perform the job he pursued earlier.
Retention Stage: The employee now is comfortable with the working conditions. He now focuses on improving his skills in his field by going for development courses offered/partnered by his company. His company sent him to premium institutions to study and master relevant skills such as coding, communication, etc.
He also builds a network of people with whom he could compete and seek advice to enhance his professional life.
Transition Stage: There can be a variety of reasons ranging from not-so-good working conditions to interest in another job that may create a sense of dislike in the job in the individual’s mind. So, he changes his career plan and may also change his entire career direction.
It is essential to understand that these steps of Career Planning are not part of any cycle. Instead, these can be done in any order, back and forth, which helps in gathering more information relevant to the person’s interests and skills about the job he is looking for or is placed in.
This gives the employee a wider spectrum of knowledge, leading to overall development in his personality, skills, qualities, and efficiency. In other words, the employee goes through a good career development path if his decisions were good enough to plan a career for himself based on his interests and the matching-skills.
This can be looked at from the organization’s point of view as well. The organization needs competent employees to work in their place to increase productivity. Hence, the organization feels obliged to develop its employees in their respective fields to motivate them to work in the same organization and enhance their productivity.
Every organization trains its best employees and discusses career plans with them, which serve as drives/ motivators, making the employee work better and more efficiently than before, which will enhance the company’s competitive position in the market.
It helps the organization reduce employee turnover if such career planning is done one-on-one with the employees since they can be allotted diverse tasks and projects that will require more thinking.
In India, we can find that the people are too desperate to plan a career with a limited bunch of options, namely medicine, engineering, Chartered Accountancy, Architecture, etc. Moreover, their careers are designed only for a period of 7-10 years, which is quite wrong since they don’t plan what they will be doing after 10-15 years from then.
People follow this convention and don’t realize that the children are not open to choosing their careers based on their interests. When the entire pool approaches these fields, it leads to a lack of scope in other areas such as Psychology, Veterinary Services, Sports-related opportunities, etc. Children opt for courses in their High School, which don’t offer diverse subjects, thus leading to less number of people working in such sectors.
For example, very few people are working in the Sports Management sector, which is an important field that has so much scope in the coming decade. Various courses are offered in foreign countries, and children can pursue different careers that suit their skills and interests, and money is not the only drive-in such countries.
Every person needs to realize that career planning will help in choosing a path that is best suited for him and help in designing the next 15-20 years of his career.
Hope you liked our article on Career Planning, and you if are looking for better opportunity you should also keep resume updated.
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