What is career planning?

Career planning incorporates short-term and long-term career goals,  personal goals and constraints. You don't always have control over outside factors such as health and family issues, but as far as possible, your planning process should incorporate the following stages:

Short-term planning	Assess your skills, knowledge, values, constraints and interests	Long-term planning
Step 1	Identify which new skills and knowledge you want to develop	Step 1
Step 2	Research career opportunities	Step 2
Step 3	Formulate a careers action plan with contingencies	Step 3
Up to 5 years ahead	Check the careers action plan for realism	From 5 to 10 years ahead

These two cycles of short-term and long-term planning run in parallel and should be reviewed regularly.

There are five steps to active career planning.

1. Self Assessment
2. Exploration and Research
3. Decision Making
4. Taking Action
5. Evaluation

Self Assessment

Self assessment revolves around the thoughtful consideration, reflection, and evaluation of your interests, personality characteristics, values, and skills through a variety of methods, such as the use of a whole host of career-related tools and instruments.

Exploration and Research

The career planning component consisting of exploration and research is all about being in information gathering mode. This is the time to explore, collect, and organize all available (and pursue not-so-available) resources to eventually begin analyzing them to see what top options arise.

Decision Making

The decision-making step of the career planning process is when you put all the pieces of information about yourself and your carefully collected career information together as best as possible to produce a list of career-related goals and options.

Taking 

Taking action is one of those things that’s easier said than done. This stage is about literally being proactive with your career plans and following through with what you’ve decided on doing.

Evaluation Action

After you have made your career-related decision(s) and identified your goals, keep in mind that many of the folks who achieve career success are the ones who continually evaluate and assess their status. They keep track of their career progress throughout their lifetime.

Career stages:

1. Growth – The early years (4 to 13 years old) is a time when the individual first becomes aware of the future.  People start to find ways to develop competencies and to achieve in order to increase control over their life.

2. Exploration – From the early teens to mid-twenties, people begin to crystallize, specify and implement an occupational choice.  Different roles are tried and various occupational options are explored though school, leisure, part-time work and volunteering.  “Trial jobs” may be tested before more firmly finding a more stable and appropriate fit.

3. Establishment – In the mid-twenties through mid-forties, typically a suitable field is selected and efforts are made to secure a long-term place in the chosen career.  Young adulthood tends to be a time for stabilizing, consolidating, building momentum and moving up.  Obtaining certifications, credentials, and advanced degrees may be the norm.

4. Maintenance - This stage usually happens in the mid-forties to mid-sixties and is characterized by constancy: 1) Holding on (stagnating or plateauing), or 2) Keeping up (updating or enriching).  Continuity, stress, safety and stability tend to be the standard.  Sometimes people feel risk adverse with various career options which may lead to frustration or even  depression.  In middle adulthood we may ask ourselves, “What have I done with my life? or Is this all there is? or even What do I truly want?”  For men, state of health or career accomplishment may predominate.  Women sometimes perceive this period as an opportunity to pursue new personal or professional goals now that their nurturing role has peaked.

5. Disengagement – The mid-sixties is typically marked by decelerating from formal employment to finding new roles with a view to retirement.  Baby Boomers are teaching us that this stage should be more appropriately named “Re-inventment.”  They are completely redesigning the notion of “retirement” preferring to work in some form while pursuing new or renewed outside interests.  In later adulthood, there may be a need to assist or mentor younger members of society or seek self-employment.

However, it has limitation due to the rapidly changing nature of work and each person’s own circumstances.  Not everyone transitions through these five stages at fixed ages or in the same manner.  I have learned in my private practice it is more common nowadays to move back and forth more frequently from the Exploration to Re-inventment stages. 

For example, before entering the Maintenance stage, many people are asking the mid-life question, “Do I want to do this job for the next twenty years?”  Eventually, they decide to either: 1) Hang onand enter the Maintenance stage, or 2) Let go and change their job, company, or career and then recycle back to an earlier stage in order to move in a new direction.  For others, their career is without boundaries based on skills and abilities that function independent of a set timeline.

Your self-image evolves throughout your life as a result of experience.  You successively refine your uniqueness over time and make adaptation in your career choices.  As we go through life stages our priorities change.  Career ideas that you had at 25 might not be relevant when you are 45 or 55.

So, what career stage do you actually find yourself in chronological terms?  What specific stage do you think you needto be in?  Perhaps this is the time to step back and reflect on where you are.  Maybe you need to return to the Exploration stage and re-evaluate your skills, values, interests, personality traits and core priorities.  At your stage, perhaps you what to find out what else is out there and you want to begin a process of career discovery.  What are the financial and time considerations of the choices you are making at your stage?  What types of planning and preparation needs to be done at each stage both personally and professionally?  Can you list three to five specific issues that you need to address right now?  What are some issues you’ll face as you pass through future stages?

These are all important questions that you will need to get clarity on in order to have successful and satisfying career development.  Just knowing that as we age, we will be progressing through career stages, can be insightful, freeing and can have a profound effect on our professional development.  Remember: It’s never too late to reinvent yourself!

Concept of career:

A Career is a sequence of positions held by a person during the course of a life time. It comprises of a series of work related activities that provide continuity, order, and meaning in a person’s life. This is an objective view of a person’s career. There is also a subjective element in the concept of career. A career consists of the changes in values, attitudes and a motivation that occurs as a person grows older.

In both the perception the primary focus is on the individual. The underlying assumption is that a person can shape his destiny through a series of well planned and well timed positive moves. However, it must be stated here as a word of caution, mere planning does not ensure career success. A person’s career is shaped by many complex factors e.g. performance, education, experience, influential parents, caste links and a certain amount of luck. As Davis stated when people rely largely on luck, however, they seldom are prepared for the career opportunities that arise. Successful people identify their career goals, plan and then take action. For them luck occurs when opportunity meets are proportional.

Features:

Some of the important features of the term career may be stated thus:

1) A career develops over time: It covers objective conditions (such as jobs, duties, responsibilities) and also includes subjective reactions (such as enthusiasm, boredom)
2) It is the individual who ultimately must judge the success of his career. He must set his own criteria for success, and such criteria can be far ranging (e.g. pay, adventure, working with new people in new environment, helping others etc)
3) The important element in one’s career is experiencing psychological success which basically is, feeling a sense of personal accomplishment and fulfillment. Psychological success energizes our efforts and impels us to undertake new challenges and scale new heights that foster our growth over time
4) The typical career of a person today would probably include many different positions, transitions and organizations more so than is in the past when employees were less mobile and organizations more stable as employers.

Job Rotation

For the executive, job rotation takes on different perspectives. The executive is usually not simply going to another department. In some vertically integrated organizations, for example, where the supplier is actually part of same organization or subsidiary, job rotation might be to the supplier to see how the business operates from the supplier point of view. Learning how the organization is perceived from the outside broadens the executive’s outlook on the process of the organization. Or the rotation might be to a foreign office to provide a global perspective.

For managers being developed for executive roles, rotation to different functions in the company is regular carried out. This approach allows the manger to operate in diverse roles and understand the different issues that crop up. If someone is to be a corporate leader, they must have this type of training. A recent study indicated that the single most significant factor that leads to leader’s achievement was the variety of experiences in different departments, business units, cities, and countries.

An organized and helpful way to develop talent for the management or executive level of the organization is job rotation. It is the process of preparing employees at a lower level to replace someone at the next higher level. It is generally done for the designations that are crucial for the effective and efficient functioning of the organization.
Benefits of Job Rotation

Some of the major benefits of job rotation are:

• It provides the employees with opportunities to broaden the horizon of knowledge, skills, and abilities by working in different departments, business units, functions, and countries
• Identification of Knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) required
• It determines the areas where improvement is required
• Assessment of the employees who have the potential and caliber for filling the position