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How to develop a career action plan

Written by: Gerry Maguire

Article Overview: The focus of this article is on the development of your career action plan. However, the process can also be easily adapted to other areas of your life. The first and most important step is to make a decision. The decision is whether or not you need a career action plan. Many may not require any action in their career at this stage of their life. For some there are more important areas in their life to which they want to devote their time. The challenge is to make a conscious decision and either accept the current job or put into place actions to achieve your goal job.

How to develop a career action plan

The focus of this article is on the development of your career action plan. However, the process can also be easily adapted to other areas of your life.

The first and most important step is to make a decision. The decision is whether or not you need a career action plan. Many may not require any action in their career at this stage of their life. For some there are more important areas in their life to which they want to devote their time. The challenge is to make a conscious decision and either accept the current job or put into place actions to achieve your goal job.

Like a business, the foundation of a strong action plan for a career is a vision, mission and identification of values. This article will not go into detail about the development of this foundation but in summary the following is suggested

Vision: Choose a time in the future and document in detail what you will be doing from a career point of view. I suggest somewhere 3 to 5 years in the future. What you should identify includes:

o where you are located,

o what you are doing,

o how you travel to your work place,

o how many hours a day you spend there,

o what sort of colleagues you have,

o what clothes you wear,

Mission: Identify what you want to achieve in your working life. As a tool to help you complete this, think of what ideally you would like to tell people when they ask you “What do you do?”

Values: Identify what is important to you in your working life. Make them behavioural statements and not just one word statements. For example if you value “excellence” (I suggest choosing the 5 or 6 most important values for you, please contact me if you would like a tool to assist with this) document a statement that will show how you will behave to show how you value excellence. For example it could be “I will value excellence by continuing to develop my knowledge in _______________ (your area of expertise).

The next steps involve identifying actions to help achieve your mission. The first of these steps is to document the key areas that need to be nurtured to achieve your career mission. For example these could be relationships, customers, my knowledge, my growth. As an example I will look at “customers” and the steps to follow to identify actions. The steps are strategy, targets and actions.

Strategy: In simple terms a strategy is a method to win. Be it war, sport, business or your own personal career having a strategy increases the likelihood of success. In regards to customers, “exceed customer expectations” is a statement not a strategy. However, “I will exceed my customer expectations by knowing their needs before they do” is a potentially very powerful strategy.

Targets: The targets that support this strategy could be:

o 80% Retention / renewal rate

o New product or service provided every six months

Actions: Actions that would help achieve this target are:

o Attend two industry conferences annually

o Call each customer once per month

o Subscribe to two industry magazines and research industry trends

Repeat this process for your other key areas and you will complete your career action plan.

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Article Tags: career action plan, career point, clothes, colleagues, conscious decision, job, place actions, point of view, value excellence, vision mission



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