Career planning is important if you want to make the most of your working life and be happy in your job. Christmas is the perfect time to reflect on your career.
1. Make Career Planning An Annual Event
Most of us go to the opticians once a year, we send our car for a MOT once a year but do we reflect on our career once a year or more? What could be more important than deciding in what direction we want our career to go? Making time once a year to think about what you have achieved during the year and what you want to change is investing for your future. Christmas is the perfect time to do this end of year review as you are away from the distractions of work.
2. Questions To Reflect On Your Career
Have you been happy in your job this year? Or if there have been things you haven’t been happy about, could you have done things differently? Write down what has gone well and what hasn’t gone so well. This will really help to focus your mind on what you’d like to change.
Also ask yourself what do you like and dislike? Everything changes including your likes and dislikes. Something you may have been happy with a year ago may have changed now you have different circumstances or different views.
Or something outside of your control may have changed within the past year. You may have a new work colleague who you are struggling to work cohesively with or your current employer may have changed your working conditions. Can you live with these changes or do you need to make a change?
3. Next Step Questions
Can you make the necessary changes within your current role? Do you need to change roles within the company you are in? Or do you need to look for a role within a different organisation or change careers completely?
If you need to change career completely, there will be further questions to ask yourself such as what career will suit me? Will I need to learn new skills or gain new qualifications?
4. Set Your Goals
You may have decided that you need to ask your boss for raise or a promotion because you feel as if you have stagnated in your current role or you may have decided that you want a complete career change. Write down your goals and draw up an action plan with dates of how you are going to achieve these goals. Make sure you stick to your action plan. January will be the perfect time when you will feel motivated to make these changes.
5. Talk To Others
Christmas is the time of year when you will spend the most time with family and friends. This is a perfect opportunity to find a listening ear to talk to about your career plans. You never know they may even give you some useful advice, especially if they have had a long career and have a lot of experience under their belt. Talking to others also really helps to clarify things in your own mind.
If you have decided to make a big career change that is going to affect your family life, during the Christmas holidays you are going to have lots of opportunities to talk to the people in your life who may be affected by these changes.
If you find you need more specialist career advice or are ready to start seeing what jobs available, talk to us, we are always ready to give advice to good candidates. Before and after Christmas are busy times for changing jobs so speak to us now.
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