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Succeed in the workplace
Succeed in the workplace

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Week 1: Start planning your career

Introduction

Welcome to Week 1 of the free badged course Succeed in the workplace – and congratulations. You have taken the first important step in deciding what you want from your working life and how to achieve it.

You’ll make a start on career planning this week by getting to know yourself. You may well feel that you already know yourself pretty well, which is great. Hopefully, the activities will give you the chance to sit and think about what is important to you, both in your day-to-day and your working life, as well as help you to unpick how you got to where you are at the moment. This is something that not many of us consciously do and it can make a very valuable contribution to planning.

All you’ll need is a notebook to write down your thoughts.

Watch the introductory video from Careers Adviser, Wendy Woolery, as she introduces the course and this week.

Download this video clip.Video player: sitw_wk1.mp4
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As suggested in the Introduction and guidance [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , we recommend that you keep a notebook to record your responses to the activities throughout the course. There are also several tables and documents which are useful to work on directly and keep. We’ve collected these together in the Resource pack, which you can download. You can either work on this directly and store it on your computer or print it out and fill it in by hand.

By the end of this week, you will be able to:

  • start to understand the careers planning process
  • know what you value about work
  • understand the route you have taken in your work-life so far
  • recognise what interests and passions you have
  • start to identify possible career options open to you.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.