Many guides tell you to think long term, that a career can take 20 years or longer. That’s great if you have the time, but often that is not the case. Whether you are entering college and need to start thinking about your future employment point, or you’ve found yourself in a situation where you need to change your career now, this quick guide will help you keep your eyes on the prize!
Day ONE: Figure Out Which Career Is Right For You
You may think you know exactly what you want to do with your life, but do you really? It’s easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing or what you’ve always done. But this decision is not about anyone else—it’s about you, and it’s an important one. Take a few hours and ask yourself some questions about what will make you truly happy, and then take some time to reflect on how each of your potential career choices fits into those answers.
We all have interests and skills that we enjoy using at work. But the key is figuring out which ones are most important to us—and which ones we’d be good at. I recommend writing down all your ideas and then ranking them based on how much you like them and how good you are at them. If possible, ask a close friend or family member for their opinion.
Once you’ve ranked your skills and interests, think about careers that use those skills and involve those interests—and then write down two or three careers that seem like a good fit for what you’ve discovered about yourself.
Day TWO: Turn Your Big Dream Into One Smaller Goal
Today is about making that one big dream into a more manageable goal. If you’ve been going over your notes from yesterday, you might feel like you have so many great ideas and goals. That’s wonderful! But sometimes, too many ideas can make it difficult to focus on just one.
Take some time today to get quiet and write down your big dream. Then think about what it will take to get there, and think of that one smaller goal as a milestone.
Perhaps your first goal is to be hired – get your foot in the door at any level. Your next goal could be to become a supervisor. Think of it in terms of losing weight. You may want to lose 100 pounds – but that takes time, and it is easy to feel like you failed by focusing on a goal that takes so long to reach. Instead, make your goal to lose 10 pounds. Once you reach that goal successfully, set a new goal.
Day THREE: Create A Plan To Reach Your Goal
It’s great that you have identified your goal, but now it’s time to create a plan to reach it! Think about all the different things that need to happen to achieve your goal, from education requirements to networking opportunities and professional development activities. Create a step-by-step process for achieving each one of these tasks, so you know exactly what needs to happen next when the time comes.
You don’t want to list the tasks that need to be accomplished. Instead, you want to describe all of the steps that need to occur to accomplish those tasks.
Create goals with measurable milestones. For example, if we set the goal of increasing sales by 10 percent next year, we cannot measure whether or not that goal has been met until next year. Instead, we should set smaller goals with measurable milestones such as increasing revenue by 1 percent every quarter and then tracking this metric over time. Once our revenue has increased by 10 percent from its current level (which means we have met our goal), we can celebrate!
Documenting your plan: Knowing what needs to happen is only half of the battle — without documenting the process, your plans are useless. Documenting your plan means recording all of your ideas for how you might accomplish each goal (including any potential roadblocks) so that others can see how they fit into the overall picture.
A Career Can Come From Many Places
If you’re looking to plan your career: slow down and start small. Careers don’t result from a single action or decision; they take time and effort to cultivate. That goes for doing what you love and building relationships with the right people. As clichéd as it may sound, career success is gratifying and can be a long process—the key to your success is consistency. Always have a goal you are trying to achieve.
