Planning your career

If you are my age – 50 something- the chances are you were expected to choose your career at school at the age of about 13 or 14; even if you are younger than me, you may still have experienced this expectation.   The logic behind it was clear; your choice of exam subjects dictated the choice of further study and thus the ultimate choice of career, but even so, it was a very early age to start planning the rest of our lives! I personally resisted the challenge and eventually became a careers guidance officer so I could force others to make the same choices!  Well, no it wasn’t just for this reason; the whole idea of choosing and planning a career fascinates me and I still work on this with people in coaching.

Time has moved on and the world has changed. It is now an accepted fact that a job for life is unlikely (and possibly undesirable) and that one person may change career two or three times during their lives. This allows more flexibility for sure but where does it leave the concept of career planning?

“If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?” This is a the title of a business planning book by Sandy Ringer but I think the title holds good for career planning too!


Taking stock

There are several ways of viewing a career “path”. Have a look at the images below and see if any of them paint the picture of your career development to date. Do you have another picture in mind?

There is no question of one path being better than the others and no standardisation; some women’s career paths are like the fireworks going off in all directions as they juggle not only business demands but the demands of home life as well and some women still follow the traditional path to climbing the corporate ladder.


Do you want to change?

If you’re happy with your planning to date (or lack of it), then don’t change it.
If you feel a bit more discipline or more flexibility would help you get where you want to go, then consider other ways of looking at it.

Whatever you decide, you need to analyse 3 key elements about yourself;
Your Values – those things that really matter to you and that you believe in
Your Personal qualities – the things that make you YOU
Your Skills – the things you know how to do


Values

In this article we will start with VALUES as this is the key to deciding how to plan your
career path and what path you want to choose.
 
Values are basic human principles, the principles, which we as human beings, all know to be right and just.  We did not need to be told these things by someone else; we have always known them to be true.  They are not beliefs.  Beliefs come from our past and are accumulated through years of being told things by others and by confirmation through our own experience.

It is a fact that most women find it hard to work in jobs and for organisations which do not reflect their own personal values in some respect. By the same token, they find it difficult to sustain lasting friendships with those who do not share their values or to stay in relationships where these values are consistently challenged.  As one woman once said to me “I couldn’t stay in that job. I can’t really define why but it just didn’t rhyme with my soul”.

Once you know your key values, you know what is important to you in life and what career path will suit you; for example if you know that one of your key values is “Organised”, then a planned and structured approach to career planning will probably appeal to you but if your number one value is “Innovative” then you may want to think and act ‘outside of the box’ to get your career moving.
 

5 steps to get you moving

1  Self awareness is a good place to start. Take the Values Test to discover your six top values (this will take you 15/20 minutes).  What have you learnt from this? (If it is easier, just print the page to work on it.

2 Check out the free career planning tools on the web. How could these help you?

3 If you have in mind the type of job you’d like and the industry and go on to a business  networking site like LinkedIn. Do some research by looking at the profiles of those in that type of job; have a look at their career paths. What insights can you get from this?

4 if you are lucky enough to be going on holiday, take the opportunity of this new situation to do some thinking about yourself and your future. Your holiday could be restful and involve self reflective hours on the beach or be very busy as you organise your family and their time but at least it’s a change of routine and can free up your thinking!

5  You don’t have to do it all alone. Get some help and start here!.
a)Post a message on the Riviera Woman forum and tap in to the wealth of knowledge we have amongst our members. Ask how other women have created their career paths.
b)Have a look at Deborah d'Alessandro’s Career Workshops for Women at Esprit Seminars. This could be exactly what you’re looking for.
c) Send me a message by clicking on my name below. Tell me of your experiences to date, tell me about the challenges you are currently facing in this area. I promise to come back to you with some ideas to help you move on. Let’s get some dialogue going.
d) phone me to discuss how the six week summer coaching package could assist you with this.

And what about personal qualities and skills?

We will come back to this in future articles and not try to do everything at once! Build solid steps NOW to effect change. Anyway you don’t need to wait for me: you can start making lists of both and asking those close to you to add to those lists and be building up that bank of information about yourself.

ENJOY!

email: Kate Cobb
0033 (0)4 93 20 68 94
www.executive-onlinecoaching.com

Look forward to Kate's next business article:

"What makes you YOU - identifying your greatest qualities"