Employment

Career Management: Career Strategies

Most people dont plan out their career strategies–but they should. If you ask, youll find that most successful individuals have constructed career strategies complete with well-defined objectives and goals. This gives them a direct understanding of precisely how to go about realizing their career aspirations.

Career Strategies Call for Specificity
Your goal is the final point where you want to end up (for now, anyway). In between, you should have quantifiable objectives leading up to your goal. These should be as specific as possible. The objective to work on my leadership skills is nebulous. There is no way to measure whether it was accomplished. A stronger statement would be, I will complete a course in leadership training by June 2005. There will be no question if this objective was attained–you either took the course by the deadline or you didnt.

Creating your career strategy will require a fair amount of thought and research. Once you have identified your goal you must find out what steps should be taken in order to reach it. Will you need further education? How many years experience will you need? What skills are necessary to excel in this job?

If you are well-informed about the various aspects of your dream career, it is more likely your strategy will succeed in achieving your final goal. Do not worry if your strategy or any of its components change, this is to be expected. In fact, career strategies should be re-examined every so often to assess whether the action plan is still relevant, and if not, revise.