Career Planning Day: How to Plan Your Future and Make That Big Change

Being successful in today's academic or corporate environment requires a good assessment of oneself and what one could offer. People who know themselves well are in a better position to deliver better services and performance. It is, therefore, essential that we set aside time to assess and take into consideration our future plans.

It is important for us to have a "career day", where we could assess our work performance and set concrete plans for improvement. What's advisable is that we have an annual or semi-annual "career day" and put our plans in paper for easy reference. A good career plan should include the following:

First, indicate your present standing. What is your professional status? What do you do? What does your job include? It would be useful to ask questions on how you are faring in school or work, what are its present challenges, how prepared are you to take on these challenges, among others. This must be comprehensive to allow you to make a better analysis in the next step.

Second, you should be able to assess where you are headed. Ask yourself, where do I want to go? What do I want do to in the long run? How should I be able to be there and do that? These are important questions you must answer to get the context of your development.

Next, you must be able to assess your current strengths and weaknesses. This would provide you with a well-rounded evaluation of individual capabilities and chances for improvement.

Lastly, you should also indicate opportunities for development and challenges or threats in meeting such. This must be followed by a viable and realistic action plan that must contain little, doable resolutions. This would increase your margin of success when it comes to self-improvement.

Organizing one's career is very helpful for advancement in today's academic and corporate environment. Take time to plan and know where to go. As Sun-Tzu correctly points out, "know yourself and your enemy (or challenges), you need not fear the result of a hundred battles".