How to Plan Your Career

Planning one’s career has become very relevant and important in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

When most of us begin our careers, one of the foremost reasons to find a job is to eke out a living. As we move ahead in our careers, our objectives and purpose change, and maybe we traverse the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

A career journey is very much similar to one’s own progression in the journey of life. One must constantly try and challenge one’s thoughts and purpose in life. The same holds good for one’s career as well.

There is also a lot that has been said about “one’s calling in life”, specially, a mid career professional needs to understand, question, introspect, and realize what his calling is. In my view, there is definitely a connection between the career goals and one’s own life goals, and the sooner we discover the link between them, the better.

At different stages in life, one’s priorities, objectives, goals, desires and purposes change. After one has worked for a few years, it is always good to look back and reflect on what one has learnt and achieved.

A simple way of doing a quick dipstick on where one stands in career transitions, is to ask oneself the following questions:

1. What are you good at (areas of expertise)?
Management pundits call this your “core competency”. Simply put, they are your areas of strengths as a professional. The answer to this question lies in observing ourselves, and taking feedback from those around us, since one may not be aware of one’s areas of strengths always. Areas of strengths could include leadership skills, project management skills, technical skills, or even people skills.

2. What do you love to do (areas of interest)?
Most of us would love to answer this question, and do take hours to describe what we love to do. It could be anything under the sun, from gardening, social service to research work. It could be work-related or a hobby. The answer to this question is indeed simple. It is the first thing that we would love to do, whenever we are given the freedom of time and space.

3. What would you like to do in future (future ambition)?
This question attempts to help us sketch our dream. It is something that we aspire to do. For instance, it could be running an organization, setting up a school for poor children or filing a patent.

Infact one does not need to wait till one’s mid career to answer these questions. These are questions that we should engage with, even before we begin a career, or even before we begin the process of thinking about our career. It could take you a few minutes, a few months or years of thinking to answer these questions. The answers to these questions will help us introspect and understand ourselves better. It could also give us a sense-check of where we are and where we are headed to.

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Sandeep Kochhar is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore and Indian Institute of Management - Kozhikode. He is Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering graduate, Six Sigma Green Belt certified professional and a Qualified MBTI Step II Practitioner. Sandeep is a MSP™ (Managing Successful Programmes) Registered Practitioner (MSP™ is a Trade Mark of the UK Office of Government Commerce).