Career Planning: Why It’s Essential For Your Success

Career planning might sound boring. Like planning out who you should fall in love with and marry. It takes away the thrill and the adventure, but I think you’ll see in this post that there’s plenty of fun still left.

Starting with a career goal in mind helps you make choices along your career path in sync with those goals. If you don’t have a goal, you won’t know what work experience or short term choices will help you get where you ultimately want to be in the long term.

Career Development: Achieve Your Goals

Your career development, the process through which you figure out your career path, should be an active one where you set goals for yourself. However, most people treat their career path less like a challenge and instead treat it more like an adventure. The two are very different.

Here’s what happens when you treat your career like a challenge.

Think of yourself as an athlete: You start with an idea in mind of where you are going. You have an action plan. You decide which career knowledge and skills are critical to develop. You may decide you want to go to college, graduate school, or get other education or training. Then you focus on your career experience. You do what you can to get yourself to the career goal you’ve set out. You recognize things shift along the way, including your own interests and goals, but you are in charge, and that fact makes you much more likely to be successful no matter what you decide to do. You can have fun along the way, but you have a sense of discipline in that you have your eye on the prize.

Here’s what happens when you treat your career like an adventure.

You’re focused on the short term over the long term, and while you might know the starting point, you have no idea where you’re going to end up — it’s all part of the fun! You gain work experience along the way, but you fall into jobs, never really knowing what is out there for you in terms of career possibility. Maybe you don’t have a job search plan, because you don’t have a plan. You’re always focused on your current situation. When it comes time for a job or career change, you wait and see what comes next. If it causes you anxiety, you try