What is career planning?

Career planning consists of activities and actions that you take to achieve your individual career goals. It is an on-going process where you:

• explore your interests and abilities
• strategically plan your career goals
• create your future work success by designing learning and action plans to help you achieve your goals (Virginia Jobs).

Career Planning:

• Self-awareness – Having knowledge about and an understanding of your own personal development.
• Opportunity awareness – An understanding of the general structures of the world of work, including career possibilities and alternative pathways.
• Decision-making and planning – How to make career decisions and being aware of pressures, influences, styles, consequences and goal setting.
• Implementing plans – Having the appropriate skill level in a range of areas to be able to translate job and career planning into reality. 

Three stages of professional development:

• Orientation stage – involves the establishing of the type of professional career a person wants and the steps that must be taken in order to achieve these objectives.
• Development stage – consists of actions undertaken in order to create and develop the necessary qualities for potential employment opportunities. This can be done through mentoring programmes, job rotation and training programmes.
• Evaluation stage – involves activities related to self-evaluation as well as the evaluation byothers. Identification of strengths and weaknesses is done at this phase.

Advantages of career planning for employees:

• the possibility to succeed faster in a career
• more autonomy and increased responsibility
• broadened work experience
• increased work contentment

Selling yourself:

Please follow the link below on how to set up your CV: