Career Planning: Map your Talents and Build your Path
Career planning is a development process of your personality. A story of how your competence grows and making a series of choices.
Career planning serves as a roadmap for your future dream work. It gives you powerful tools to strategically plan and direct your studies to reach your career goals. Your choices impact your progress, so achieving your dream job requires a systematic, goal-oriented, and dedicated mindset. Consider what you would love to do so much that someone would pay for it – this is a crucial aspect of career planning. Accumulating practical experience through various jobs and roles and moving linearly between tasks or advancing from one level to another, is also an important part of this process.
Career planning consists of many aspects: What kind of job do you want? Are you planning your career as an employee or as an entrepreneur? Where do graduates from your field work? What requirements do the employers have? What kind of skills should you acquire? What kind of personal study plan (PSP) and which profiling modules support the development of your skills? How does the career planning of an employee differ from an entrepreneur’s career planning? The choices you make in response to these questions are a great part of your career journey.
Career planning is a lifelong project and a continuous process. As a student at HAMK, there are straightforward ways for you to get started.
From process to the project: How do I get started?
The career planning project begins with identifying and illustrating your own vision. You can start by asking yourself the following questions.
What have I accomplished?
What do I know and what can I do?
What are my interests?
What are my values?
What are my goals, motivation, and plans?
What are my options?
What are the options that interest me the most and how do I get from there?
What are my possibilities?
We are all individuals with our own values and visions. Mapping out your own interests, motivation, and goals will help you understand who you are and where you are standing at a given phase. Understanding yourself lays the foundation for you to plan your career path.
From visions to a plan – how do I continue?
Turn your dreams and vision into a concrete career plan. This plan is your roadmap for the implementation of your career goals . A good plan answers the question: How are things done or how will you make this happen? Therefore, aim for a plan that is as accurate and concrete as possible and find out about things that are unclear to you at all levels. A good plan also includes a schedule and a budget.
The following steps can help turn your visions into a concrete plan.
1. Where am I now? – identify yourself and your skills.
To map your current situation, begin by a reflection on where you are in your journey to becoming a professional and how your current skills align with your goals. Describe your competence in concrete terms. Describe your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, considering the present situation. Do you have a CV, a business card, a social media profile? What are you most interested in? What are your hobbies? What are your current skills? Identify technical skills, soft skills and other relevant skills as well that can contribute to your competence such as languages, certifications, or unique experiences. Do you consider yourself as being networked? How can you expand your network?
2. Where do I want to go? – define your goals.
Visualize your dream career, profession, or job. What kind of skills and competencies are required? Do you have to develop some of your skills or acquire new ones? Do your competence and skills match the requirements of the companies in your industry? What do you want to accomplish from each course, project, thesis, and training? What optional courses should you attend to serve your goals better?
Write down or illustrate your career goals career goals to make them visible. Consider and identify what kind of competence and skills you need to reach these goals. What kind of professional profile do you have? Where do you work and how do you live? What factors affect your vision of work and career?
3. How do I get there? – plan your path.
Plan a roadmap of your career path. This is the most important part of the plan. Start by outlining the steps needed to achieve your goals. Clearly define your ultimate career goal, you can be as precise as possible, for instance, stating what position, what role , or industry do you aim to reach . Then break down your end goad into smaller, manageable milestones. Here you can define what achievements you want to do and at what point of your life to mark your progress along the way.
The next step: What kind of competence and skills you need and where you can acquire them? What kind of studies or work experience do you need? Then plan your visibility as a professional: Do you have a CV, portfolio, your own professional social media profile? Think about both the professional tools and your personal branding. Then you can allocate the time and resources; Do you need time to implement the plan and how much time? Do you need financial or other support? Are there obstacles or threats against the realization of your plan? Do you need people other than yourself to realize your plan? With whom or which party does it make sense to network and how does it happen?
4. How do I keep on going? – reflect and be active.
It is important that you are actively reflecting on your goals and update your plan accordingly and constantly. What have your learned and achieved recently? Where have you succeeded and where have you failed? How should you further develop your competence? Do you need more professional contacts and network? How do you sell your value and demonstrate your talents to the companies? What should you do more?
Career planning is an ongoing process that happens throughout your life: before, during and even after your studies. You start making career choices already when choosing what to study and which work placements to take. Are you following a traditional path, or do you have the courage to explore something different and interesting that will align with your personal strengths ? Self-awareness, understanding your options, and recognizing the realities of the job market are essential foundations for effective career planning. Make your vision of your future and your career goals clearly defined and outline how you plan to achieve them. Include a lot of practical measures and check that they are based on well-considered decisions.
If you are interested in talking more about career planning, get to know about HAMK´s career and integration support here and book a career guidance meeting: Career Services for International Degree Students – HAMK.