How to Write Your Career Plan

At My Performance Pitstop we know that putting together a career development plan can be a daunting experience. In order to help you to navigate yourself through the career planning process, we’ve put together some simple steps to get you started in the right direction to having a detailed and effective career plan.

Step 1. Set your objectives

Knowing exactly what you want to achieve is an essential first step in creating an effective career development plan. Work through the following questions to help you to refine your goals so that they are specific, relevant and most importantly inspiring to you - you have to want to achieve them.

• What do you want to achieve? What is your objective?
• Why do you want to achieve this objective? What’s important to you about it?
• What difference would achieving your objective make to you personally?
• What difference would achieving your objective make to your future career?
• How will you know when you’ve achieved your objective?
• What would success look like for you and your career when you’ve achieved your objective?

Step 2. Assess your current position

In order to move towards to achieving your objective, it’s important to have a good understanding of where you are now, as well as what skills and knowledge you’ve already attained. By having a clear idea of what you want to achieve (step 1, above) and where you are now (step 2), you’ll find it much easier to map a path between the two. The following questions will help you to assess the reality of your current situation:

• Where are you now?
• What are your current skills / areas of expertise / competencies?
• What are your strengths? What to you do well?
• Which areas do you consider to be your development areas? What could you be better at?
• What skills, knowledge or behaviour do you need to develop in order to achieve your objective?

Step 3. Review your options

Once you are clear about where you are going to (your objective) and how far you have to go to get there, it’s time to review all of the options open to you to help you to bridge the gap. The best way to approach option generation is with an open mind. Write down as many ideas and options as possible (without analysing them) and then once you have a complete list, work through each option in turn, identifying the pro’s and cons. Here are some questions to get you started on generating options:

• Which skills / knowledge / behaviours do you want to develop?
• Which of the skills / knowledge / behaviours that you have chosen could be quick wins and which will take longer to achieve?
• What things can you do to make an impact to your skills development straight away?
• Who can help / support / coach or mentor you to enable you to achieve your objectives?
• What training or development is easily accessible to you?
• Which skills / knowledge / behaviours can you develop as part of your current role or part of what you do now?
• Where will you look for additional ways of developing your skills?

Step 4. Create your action plan

The final and most important stage of putting together your career development plan is about committing to what action you are actually going to take. Your career development plan is likely to include a number of separate actions, some of which will be quicker and easier to complete than others, but the key to making them achievable (and more likely that you’ll achieve them) is to make sure that they are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, Time-bound. For more information on using the SMART tool to set SMART objectives or SMART Actions, click here.

Use the following questions to help you to create the actions that will form the final part of your career development plan:

• What individual steps do you need to take to achieve each objective?
• How will you track your progress against each objective?
• What barriers / obstacles might get in your way?
• How will you overcome the barriers / obstacles you have identified?
• How will you celebrate success when you’ve achieved each objective?

Helpful resources

Creating SMART Objectives and Action Plans