Career planning means thinking about your career to date, what you like or didn’t like, and using that to come up with a roadmap for where you want your career to go. It’s a great tool if you’re looking for a new job, but also in general – and here’s why!
- Now is a good time to think about the next job you want due to strong market conditions
A recent report showed that, due to the increasing number of open vacancies in the recruitment market, salaries have risen to their highest point in years. Therefore, it makes sense to use this to your advantage and get searching. This time of year, post-summer and once the kids are back at school, tends to see an influx of available candidates who start actively looking – this means that this improvement in favourable conditions for jobseekers isn’t likely to last forever.
- Look at job descriptions so you know which skills/experience you need
One of the most important pieces of advice we can for career planning give is to always tailor your application to the specific role you’re applying for. That might seem like a lot of work if you’re applying for multiple roles at the same time, but it really does show the hiring manager or whoever will be looking at your CV that you, firstly, care about the role, but also that you are qualified to do it.
- Having a dream role/company in mind gives you something to aim for
When career planning, it is good practice to think in both the long- and short-term. To help with the latter, do some research and figure out what your dream role or company (or both!) are. Then, when you’ve got this in mind, you can look into what skills, qualifications and experience you need to achieve this. This can then inform what you need to do in the near future to get there!
- Will help you keep your CV focused and relevant
Another benefit of career planning is that it’ll help you focus in on where you are at now in terms of skills, qualifications and experience. When you really focus down on these things, you can then avoid waffling on your CV and hit those key points in a clear and concise manner.
- Makes you reflect on what you do and don’t like about your current situation and motivates you to change the bad bits and have more of the good stuff
A key aim of career planning is to help you picture what the ideal journey for your career would be, and obviously that means identifying the positives and negatives of your career to date. Once you have these details, that can heavily inform what you envision the journey to be in your future. Try to be as detailed as you can – the more detail you can put on paper, the easier it’ll be for you when searching for your next role.
- It’ll help your recruiter match you with the perfect job/company
Speaking of searching for your next role, the final major benefit of career planning is a combination of all of the above – if you can tell your recruiter exactly what you are or aren’t looking for in your next role, they’ll be able to match you with a role closely suited to what you found when career planning.
If you want some help with your career planning, get in touch via this contact form.
