Career Planning – A Step By Step Guide
By Perminus Wainaina
A career plan helps determine your interests and skills, the kind of career you should pursue and any training and skills you need to add in order to succeed in your chosen career.
Developing a career plan will help you focus on what you already want to do and determine how you will get there.
And then when you are ready to write a professional CV, you will have a better understanding of the skills you have and experience to talk about with a potential employer.
Succeeding in your chosen career requires you to have the right mindset.
Career planning is basically a continuous process that will not happen overnight. Through it all, you will have to ask yourself what you can do now to maximize your success in the future.
Here is a step by step guide on how to plan your career.
1. Identify what you love or would love to do
Growing your career will not take a day or a week but it’s a gradual process that requires your time and dedication. A career interest is basically a career path you would like to pursue.
If you meet with a career coach, they would be in a position to conduct a thorough assessment and determine which career path you can take. This is dependent on your interests, strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, and skills.
A major career interest would be for example sales and marketing in the FMCG industry.
This highlights your interest as well as the industry where you would like to practice your trade. It should be realistic and achievable within your specified time.
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2. Conduct a thorough self-assessment
The journey to creating the career you want begins with knowing yourself.
What do you have already in terms of skills, expertise, and knowledge? Use your CV, transcripts and work experience to identify the areas that you are already good at.
A personality test will help you understand your own personality better and determine the way forward.
Use these skills and experience to determine if you have what it takes already to pursue your chosen career.
You can then pick up on other skills that you are lacking along the way.
3. Identify long-term professional goals
Now that you have identified a career interest, it’s time to determine the positions and achievements that would get you there.
For instance, if your interest is sales and marketing, your long-term goals would be to become a regional sales manager.
Determine steps that will make you achieve that goal. If you are a sales associate at the moment to become a regional sales manager you need to move up in different positions. This means moving from an associate to a sales manager and finally a regional sales manager.
Your long-term goals could also be in terms of accomplishments like writing a book.
4. Identify short-term goals that will contribute to your long-term ones
Identify obstacles both personal as well as external that may prevent you from accomplishing your long-term goals. For instance, your short-term goal would be to acquire digital marketing skills but time and money is not working for you.
You could move past this barrier by finding ways of completing your tasks within time or delegating some duties so that you can set aside time for part-time classes.
5. Identify things you must do to make your career happen
You already know what career you need to pursue and the challenges you need to overcome to do so. You then need to identify the activities that you must undertake to accomplish these goals. This could be in terms of time, resources, experience and expertise.
One of the activities, for instance, would be to seek the guidance of a mentor who will guide you through the journey. It could also entail sharpening your skills which will enable you to get closer to the career you want.
What tasks in your current position are contributing to your long-term goals?
This is the best way to determine if you are moving forward or not. Remember that a career is built over time and so you need to focus your energy on that.
This means handling responsibilities that will contribute to the achievement of your long-term goals.
If your chosen career is in digital marketing for instance, what responsibilities in your current job are contributing to you achieving this?
If your job is not contributing to your long-term success, maybe it’s time you found a new one. You cannot build a career stuck in the wrong job.
There is a big difference between a career and a job that most Kenyan professionals don’t realize. While a job is something you get into, a career needs a lot of planning and will not happen in a day.
You need to identify what your interest is and then write down a career plan to help you achieve that.
It will involve a lot of doing and undoing and in some cases resources like time and money but it’s what you must do if you are to build a solid career in Kenya.
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Perminus Wainaina is a Certified HR Consultant, Career Coach and Managing Partner of Corporate Staffing Services, a leading recruitment firm in Kenya. As a career coach, Perminus works with experienced professionals in helping them determine and achieve what they want in their career.