Career Development

Career development is an ongoing, lifelong process to help you learn and achieve more in your career.  Whether you are looking at making a career change, moving up within a company or expanding your own business, planning your own career development will help you succeed.

Why is it important to me?

By creating a personal career development plan, you can set goals and objectives for your own personal career growth.  Just realising that you need to take control of your own career future is the first step to career growth and job satisfaction.  Your roadmap to success begins with planning your career development process and there are many approaches you can take to accomplish this.

How do I go about it?

There are many different evaluation models, online tests and needs analysis tools available to help you put together a career plan.  Some of these tools and models may appear a little overwhelming in the first instance, especially if you are unclear about your career pathway and end game, so sometimes it is easier writing your thoughts and dreams jobs before you start.

The first stage in the process is Self-Assessment, which helps you to discover your desires and passions. What would you do if money were no object? You may know exactly what you want to do.  Once you figure out what you like doing, you then need to look at what you are good at doing and your working skill set.  Career Skill Assessment is similar to the self-assessment, but rather than focusing on your personality and interests, career skill assessments focus on your core job strengths and weaknesses.

Now that you understand your personality, interests, skills and strengths, it's time to make a decision about what pathway you want to choose and start Setting Your Career Objectives.  Finally, compiling this into a Career Development Plan enables you to set goals and timelines based on your career objectives.  You could include your ultimate goal in your initial career development plan, or you could approach your plan in phases. You can also be as detailed as you want. 

For example, perhaps you'd like to manage a handful of tennis clubs in your area, but first you'd like to become head coach at your existing venue.  On one hand, you could devise a plan with the ultimate goal of managing multiple venues, programmes and coaches, along with all the steps you need to take to get there.  If this approach seems a little overwhelming, you could break your plan up into phases and only include the objective of becoming Head Coach in your initial plan. You would review regularly and revise as you accomplish some of your initial goals to ensure the plan and you evolve.