Successful Career Planning is a way of understanding yourself and the work world and a way of acting that improves your career success. This means understanding the external economic, business and social landscape; learning about new work and career realities; and ensuring your continued marketability. It also means knowing yourself so you can make the right decisions about your career.
We may have grown up believing in a series of rules that guided our behavior, and we thought we could make certain hypotheses about the future based on these rules. Now none of these rules apply. For the most part, only an absence of rules guides our careers.
To manage your career, it’s crucial to understand the shape of careers to come. There are some tough realities associated with the new career, but there are also some tremendous opportunities if you can position yourself to take advantage of the options available to you.
There is no such thing as one perfect job or situation. There are good matches and bad matches. There will always be a number of career options that could be equally engaging to you. Developing a career plan requires time, effort and careful self-examination.
The workplace has changed, and the rules of career success have changed along with it. There are new rules for putting career planning strategies to work.