When you think about where you want your career to be in 10 years, what do you think about? It can be hard enough to plan where you want to be in the near future, and it can be hard to know how to get to the end of your career. What’s more, everyone has grand dreams for where they want to be in life and who they want to become. Oftentimes, you might have a mentor or someone who you look up to and think, I hope I’m like them when I’m that age. So, how can you make sure you can make that happen?
The reality is, the people who you look up to, and the people whose lives you want to emulate, also started exactly where you are now. They started at the bottom and worked their way up to where they are today, with something anyone and everyone can easily do—with a career development plan.
So, one of the best-kept secrets to building the career of your dreams is to create a career development plan, as a way to take control of your life and get on a path for professional growth. Everyone who is successful has arrived at their end goal with hard work and dedication—and you can do this too with a career development plan for yourself to reach your professional development goals.
Depending on who you ask, a career development plan can mean different things. To some people, a successful professional development plan has the end goal of making a lot of money. For others, a career development plan can be seen as a tool to successfully make the lives of employers and employees alike more fulfilled.
Enhancing the fulfilllment of your company and the people working in it is a surefire way to create a successful business. For others, a career development plan might have the goal of accomplishing a goal or reaching a certain position or job title in your career.
No matter what your end goal is, you will have to identify what you want in life so that you can tailor your career development goals to your unique situation. At the end of the day, what is the fundamental aspect of your career development plan? Values.
When you are creating a plan to help you reach a place of success, you can also view making this type of plan as a way to map out your progress in the place you are at now. With this in mind, when you are looking to advance your career you think about it in the way of an upward climb, like climbing a career ladder.
With this type of career plan in mind, every promotion you get can be one step closer to your ultimate title. So, you can strategize ways to move up the career ladder within your own company, and each promotion will elevate you to the next level.
There are always job opportunities you can move into even laterally, so while it might not always be an upward climb to the next position, even lateral moves can prove to be excellent job opportunities that can teach you skills to launch you to the next tier of your career.
When you are strategizing what the next best move is for your career, moving up is not always the right move for you. Sometimes, if you have an opportunity to take another path, even if you are not necessarily moving up yet, you will be learning new valuable skills that will help you get to where you want to be, that maybe you wouldn’t have experienced had you taken the job promotion in the same path that you were currently on.
So, to find your right career path, it’s always good to consider the obvious career options and look towards more nuanced options, that might not make you a CEO right away but may be laying the groundwork to get there! This can sometimes be called horizontal career levels. It’s always a good idea to examine career development path options that might be multi-dimensional, as that is the way many people reach great heights of success. Oftentimes, true success is not just one easy path forward.
When you are creating a career development plan, you might be thinking and planning for years and even decades down the line. If you are not doing something that matches your nature and your passion, that you are generally interested in, chances are that you will not be motivated to continue down the path you have created for yourself for very long. Whether money might be the motivation, or maybe you have influences in your life who have set expectations on you to do something specific with your life. However, if it is not something that you are naturally apt for, it will be difficult to ever truly be the best at what you do.
So, when you are developing your career plan, you should consider what excites you and makes you excited about going to work each day. It is career paths that align with your passions that will ultimately take you to the next level.
When you are planning your job development and mapping out a career plan for you, it is important to come up with achievable goals. If your goals are not achievable, you may feel like what you want to accomplish is too far out of reach, and you might lose motivation or hope that you will be able to achieve them. At the end of the day, your attitude is incredibly important; you have to believe in yourself and feel positive about accomplishing small tasks that will all come together to push you further toward your goal. By making small goals that you can actively and often accomplish, you can have a stronger foundation ever step you climb toward your goal.