The Secret to Achieving your Biggest Professional Goals

Our recent readership survey showed that ~90% of us lack a well-defined career plan. A career plan is a roadmap to a successful future and achieving your professional goals.

However, you need to have a profession in mind before you can write an effective career plan. If you’re still at the point where you’re considering your options, check out my previous posts that help with this:

• 7 Questions to Answer when Considering your Career Options
• 3 Essential Questions to Narrow Down your Career Options
• Identifying Career Options (part 1)
• Identifying Career Options (part 2)
• How to Identify your Greatest Personal Strengths and Leverage them in your Career
• 3 Quick Exercises to Establish your Core Values for Career Planning
• How to Determine your Future Career Path – 7 Steps to Establish an Actionable Career Programme
• 5 Key Questions to Ask when Considering a new career

Briefly there is a two-fold process to identifying your career of choice:

Step 1 – Get to know yourself really well; your values, interests and generally what makes you tick. Understanding this will enable you to establish the roles you’ll excel in. There are some really good questionnaires to help with this at:

www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu

Step 2 – Explore your options and research them in depth; think big, then narrow down your options. If your feeling overwhelmed by this, the following site can help you make a start:

https://80000hours.org/career-decision/process/

 Once you have a profession in mind, you can start your career plan.

What benefits will a career plan give me?

 Throughout my years as a postgraduate and postdoc, and even once I started my first faculty position, I did not have a career plan for reaching my professional goals. Of course, I had goals, but I had not distilled them to actions and deadlines. Rather, the goals were merely an idea of where I wanted to be in an undefined future. I took a vague approach to career planning.

I didn’t have a plan because I never knew I needed one or really understood the benefits. After all, I was an academic and, like many of my peers, I was focused on quality data, publications and success on grant boards. These are the metrics of success in academia.

I now realize I could have benefited greatly from being more strategic about my career. If I’d taken time at regular intervals during my academic career to plan out actionable goals in greater detail, I would have achieved success more quickly with less toil.

Once I finally did sit down to write a career plan, it was like a revelation. I had been beavering away in academia for the last decade. Running experiments, writing grants, balancing my teaching commitments and generally feeling as if I was continually spinning plates. When a question popped in my head ‘could I take a more strategic approach to make this all work?’, I started looking into how to do this. It didn’t take me long to realise most successful people use career planning strategies to achieve their goals.

When I sat down to draft out a career plan, it was the first time I had properly considered where I wanted to be in 5 years’ time. It was also when I realized the academic system was not a viable path to my goals. So at that point, I took a different direction.

A 5-year career plan needn’t lead to a major career shift like mine, but it will enhance your chances of reaching your goals and shortening the time to get there.  A career plan helps you prioritize, course correct along the way and stay motivated in tough times. 

Here is a list of the main benefits of having a career plan:

1. Focuses you on your priorities 

When you have a clear vision of your career goals, it will be easier to navigate in the real-world. It will enable you to easily track each year and decide if you need to change things accordingly to reach the goals set. Consider what are the major priorities are for each year and state them in your plan. If things do need changing (an inevitably they will in real life), you shouldn’t feel too overwhelmed if you’ve got it mapped out and can adjust your plan accordingly. 

2. Helps you make well-informed decisions 

Once you’ve mapped out your goals in a clear manner, you will be in a better position to evaluate which opportunities will help you achieve them and those distractions that won’t. You will be able to focus more effectively. When making decisions, you’ll be safe in the knowledge that equipped with a plan, you to know where you want to be and provide an idea of how to get there, without being constantly distracted.

3. Enables you to take control 

A well-defined career plan will give you a greater sense of control over where you’re heading professionally, and help to prevent you feeling lost and frustrated in the day-to-day throws of your work. As much of a cliché as this may sound, I think it’s true – that with a well-planned vision of success, you’re more likely to feel in control of gaining what you want and hence achieving it.

4. Maintain motivation 

When you consider your overall 5-year goals, it can feel dauting if the end game appears out of reach at present. But by breaking it down into manageable chunks in the plan, it will help provide clarity on how your day-to-day work contributes to obtaining your plan. This will help you maintain motivation even when things get tough in the workplace. 

5. Provides you with perspective 

By focusing on the outcomes, you’ll be empowered to strike a better balance between your professional and personal responsibilities. In terms of your own wellbeing, this can be one of the most important aspects of writing a career plan.

What does a career plan look like?

Useful plans layout achievable milestones along a timeline. In the most basic terms, you need to layout your aims of where you will be along the timeline and the milestone achievements required to get there: