What’s in a Career Plan?
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I’ve never had a career plan. My most feared question in an interview was always “where do you want to be in five years?” Until my current job, I had never decided that there was a particular job I wanted and made a deliberate effort to get there.
I had always just stayed in a job for as long as I was enjoying it. As soon as I was unhappy, or bored, I started looking around for my next opportunity. Sometimes these came from applying for jobs, sometimes from being asked to work on a particular project, sometimes from putting my hand up for a job no-one else wanted. I always thought that my success was due largely to luck, having a positive attitude and working hard.
While I was always ambitious, and hoped to end up as a senior executive, I had never worked out how I was going to get there, or developed particular strategies, or had a dream job in the public service.
But having spent a significant proportion of the last year providing career coaching to innumerable clients, I have realised that I did in fact have a career plan. It just didn’t look how I thought it should.
My husband and I are almost constantly planning our careers. The thing is, that we can’t plan a career without planning a life. We re-assess a whole lot of things in our lives pretty much every year, and generally make a few adjustments here and there, and then every three or four years we make a big life-changing decision that has a huge effect on our careers. These sorts of decisions are things like overseas trips, having children, working part-time, applying for a promotion, taking long service leave, or leave without pay, taking a step back career-wise (usually for health reasons), or even quitting a 20-year career in the public service to take a huge risk in starting a whole new career.
Each of these steps has taken a huge amount of planning. We have worked out our leave arrangements, our financial position, the kind of care we want for our children, and who will be the primary care-giver. It has also required consideration of other important life choices, such as: buying a house, managing our health, and general work-life balance.
And of course, in discussing all of these broader issues, we have also taken into consideration our careers. Our careers have always been an integral part of these decisions, and these decisions have always been an integral part of our career choices.
So once we have set the parameters in terms of financial goals, work-life balance, caring responsibilities, health etc, we have then each considered our career goals. Personally, I have never stayed in a job where I have been unhappy for longer than a few months. Over the years, I gradually developed a set of criteria for jobs for which I was compatible. In my experience, these criteria will be different for everyone, but common themes exist.
For me, my supervisor has always been key to my level of enjoyment for a job. Working for someone from whom I can learn has always been important – someone committed to their job, enthusiastic, and intelligent. This hasn’t always meant that I liked them. In fact, some of the best lessons I learned from a supervisor were from someone that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to work for, but he was intelligent and good at his job, and taught me a lot that I might not have learned from someone that was more like me.
Learning on the job has also always been important to me – having new challenges and being challenged, having the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone. I like working in a team – I am no good on my own, and easily get bored and distracted if left to my own devices. I like a job that makes me think, and involves problem-solving. But for me, I eventually worked out that content was important too – I like finance and numbers, and if my job doesn’t include them I miss them (sad but true). I also like a fast pace, deadlines work well for me…as I mentioned earlier, I easily get bored, and deadlines are an antidote to boredom for me.
And over the years, I have taken deliberate steps to ensure that I am positioned well to be in the jobs I wanted. Once I had realised that finance suited me, I started studying part-time to gain qualifications in accounting. And when I decided I wanted to be an executive coach, I worked out what it took to become credentialed with the International Coaching Federation and started doing both the training and following the job opportunities that had me reach that goal.
If you put all this together, being clear about what I want from a job, along with a whole lot of life goals – I have finally realised that I am very rarely without a career plan. I just never write it down, and don’t call it a career plan.
So, if someone asked me now “where do you want to be in five years?” I would have a very clear idea of how I would answer it. Luckily for me, I’m pretty much there, but along with my husband, I never take this for granted, and I am constantly re-assessing if my career is working for me within the broader context of my life, and if not, seeking new opportunities.
Do you have a career plan? Or do you just go where opportunities take you?
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