Let your career go with the flow as most other people do and you will find yourself drifting towards waterfalls and rapids – loss in motivation, low career satisfaction, being passed over for promotions, lower income than what you can make, work thrown at you. Plan your career journey by learning how to write a good personal development plan and you’ll be on track for success.
Your career success is not a result of the actions someone else takes, the circumstances, or luck. Instead, it is the result of thoughtful decisions, careful planning, and persistent actions.
For the free PDP template click here.
Why career planning is important?
Spending time on your professional development is linked to 5 very powerful outcomes: self-fulfilment, competitive advantage, higher salary, and promotion opportunities, improved adaptability, confidence, and health.
But it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and wonder where to start. This is why career planning is so important. It is your compass to navigate your career journey and the vast amount of opportunities.
How to write a good personal development plan for your career?
A good personal development plan answers the following questions:
- What do I want to achieve?
- How will I achieve it?
- By when will I achieve it?
- What may hold me back?
- Whose help do I need?
- Why is this important to me?
Let’s go into each of these in more detail.
1. What do I want to achieve?
It’s important to consider both internal and external career drivers.
External drivers are things like globalization, and automation, in general, how is your job/industry changing? You want to set up a career plan that makes you competitive and ready for the future world.
What are my personal interests and aspirations?
Build the skills and knowledge today that will fill tomorrow’s skills gaps.
2. How will I achieve it?
When deciding how to build a new skill or knowledge, the 70-20-10 model is a popular framework to adopt.
Roughly 10% of your professional development is via learning – training, classroom-based or online, reading book summaries or self-development books, listening to podcasts etc. This is where you should start. Via learning, you equip yourself with the tools and tricks to then implement in practice. Speak to your HR department to identify what your company
20% of your development is via social interactions – being mentored and mentoring others, learning from your colleagues, networking.
70% of your professional development happens on the job when you’re actively practising. Seek practice opportunities such as stretch assignments, project work, volunteering, lateral or horizontal job moves, and board memberships.
If you are struggling with time, get inspiration from these personal development activities which take little to no time but are nonetheless very powerful to reach your goals.
3. By when will I achieve it?
I recommend my clients set 2 to 5-year goals at most. The reason is we live in a VUCA world – one defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Plus your individual interests and values change as your career journey unfolds. So a goal you set for 10 or 20 years from now is extremely unlikely to be relevant to you at that point because both you and the world will have changed so much.
4. What may hold me back?
Internal or external barriers may hold back your progress and cause you to give up. Identify these as well as ways to address them. The most common ones are lack of time, losing momentum, and motivation. Many of us make critical career mistakes too which really hold us back from career success.
In the past what has stopped you from achieving your goals and how can you address these blockers?
5. Whose help do I need?
You are the captain of this ship but you need people by your side to help you on this voyage. Research suggests having the support of your manager is vital for advancing your career.
If you and your manager don’t have this relationship already, convince them how you developing certain skills or knowledge will benefit the whole department including them as individuals.
But if you really don’t have a supportive advocate in the face of your manager, find other people in your network to be your mentors and advocates. They will play a critical role in identifying those opportunities to learn and grow. And if networking is not your key strength, check out these thought-provoking networking questions which really lead to meaningful conversations.
6. Why is this important to me?
This, in my opinion, is the most important question to ask. Knowing your ‘why’ will give you the motivation to do an online course vs scrolling on social media for 2 hours every day (yes, this is the global average!). Knowing your why will give you the motivation to face your fears and get out of your comfort zone.
So ask yourself, why is achieving this goal important to me? And when you’ve answered it ask yourself Why at least 2 more times! This will give you your ultimate why – the reason why you will persist on your career journey.
Practical Example Of How To Write A Career Plan
Meet Shelley
Shelley is a Senior Sales Associate at an Insurance Company. Her aspiration is to be promoted to Sales Manager in the next 2 years.
Using the free personal development plan template, she reflects on what skills she needs to develop to step up to the next level of Sales Manager. She identifies 2 such critical skills – coaching junior staff and influencing skills.
Using the worksheet, she also reflects on and researches how her industry and her customer demands are changing. As a result, she identifies another critical skill to develop – digital transformation.
Shelley’s personal development plan
First, she decides to do some training on these topics. She speaks to her HR department and finds out that she gets free access to LinkedIn Learning and getAbstract via her employer. Shelley then spends 30min researching the courses and books and shortlists some for each topic. She blocks 10min in her diary every morning to start her day with learning and also decides to listen to the courses when working out.
Her manager is not very engaged in coaching her. So she creates opportunities for herself. Using the guide, she lists who from her network can help her. To start with, she arranges a mentoring session with a senior member of the team who left the company recently.
She also finds out there’s a monthly Transformation forum where improvements are being discussed and volunteers to participate. With the things she has learned from the Digital Transformation course, she quickly identifies some quick wins to make everyone’s job easier.
To gain practical experiences she offers to her manager that she trains and coaches the new hire who joins soon. This would free up their time whilst giving her the opportunity to coach junior staff. She suggests she gives her manager a weekly update for reassurance that the training process is going well.
Finally, Shelley sets up quarterly development meetings with her manager. She would like to showcase her improvement to them as she understands promotion decisions are down to them.
Download your FREE Personal Development Plan Template to help you focus your development efforts and replace struggle with effective action, frustration with continued motivation, and confusion with clarity and intention.
Figured out the best thing you should do for your career now is to find a new job? Check out these powerful tips on what to include in your CV so that you don’t end up in the rejection pile!
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