Career Action Plan

Developing Your Career Action Plan

Overview

So far you have been analyzing your strengths, and uncovering valuable information for the career planning process as well as your job search.

In this lesson, you will set up an action plan and develop concrete goals or steps that you can take to move forward with your career.

You will base your goals on where you are now, where you would like to be in the future, and the steps you need to take to successfully attain your goals—whatever they are.

You can design activities (we’ll call them “small experiments”) that you can do right now—whether you plan to seek a job in one month or two years.

One of the challenges with goal setting is that if the goal is too far in the future (such as going to law school in 3 years) it’s easy to put off activities related to that goal (like doing an internship or taking a related class). And then by the time the goal should arrive, you suddenly realize you haven’t fully prepared for it.

The career plan you develop in this lesson will help you know what you need to do next as you work your way toward your career goal. Don’t have a goal? That’s OK—we have a system for dealing with that as well.

Objectives

By the end of this lesson you will:

* Identify whether you should set goals or intentions

* Assess where you are so far in the career development process

* Determine the best strategy for planning your future based on your self-assessment and the clarity of your plans

* Develop the steps to move toward whatever goal/intention you have created

Download and fill out this plan:

Career Action Plan (pdf)

Career Action Plan (word)

When you are done, e-mail it to the instructor.

NOTE: Can this be done as a form?