Charting Your Career

Like an organisation or a business entity, your career needs to be planned and work upon to increase its chance to reach the intended target. Please do not assume that the employer will be managing your career.

There are basically 2 important issues in charting your career.

1. Setting the vision or target

2. Working on the steps to achieve the target.

It seem to be so simple and straight forward, but the implication is great. It reminds me of my schooling days, in year ninth, the best student was a girl, and when asked what she wanted her career to be, she said she wanted to be a nurse. And later, I found out that she actually became a nurse, despite her outstanding academic result.

This demonstrates the difficulty of setting the target, if it is too low, you would be wasting your talent, if it is too hight, it would be beyond your capability.

The followings are the 4 steps to create your career map:

1. Examine your current position. Write down the details of the following items:

- job title

- salary and benefit

- key responsibility

- existing skill

- future prospects

2. Identify your long term goals

- identify at least 5 goals. It is important that the goals to be smart, i.e specific, measurable. attainable, relevant and time-bound.

3. Plan your future career

For the next five years, identify the job you are eyeing, identify the skills and knowledge required for the job and link it to the long term set goals.

4. Create a detailed action plan.

Identify the objectives and the skills you need to achieve both the short term enabling goals and identify the plans to achieve the required skills.

THE DOMAINS OF THE GOALS

There are many areas where you may need to focus your goals. The list are given below, which may not be similar to your intended order.

a. Money matter - you may like to put a target of your intended salary, or monthly savings or money related life-style.

b. Social Standing - You may want your career to position you in the circle of the elite, or social class.

c. Skills building - The career can be a steeping stone to develop skills that can be used for other purposes. Some of the questions that can be asked are:

- which of the existing skills would you like to develop or master?

- Which skills do you like to learn?

- which skills will support me to get my objectives?

d. Personal life - The career can be viewed as one of the elements of your life plan. So having a clear objective of your life plan will help you to construct the career plan. Some of the relevant questions in you life plan can be:

- if you had passed away, what do you like people to remember you as?.

- Assume if you are doing to die tomorrow, what are the things that you regret that you had not done?.

The career map, just like the road map, can help you to reach your destination. It will give the logical path and the steps to be taken in you move to reach the destination