3.3 Your career action plans

By this point, you've looked at where you are now and where you want to go. Now you are in a stronger position to develop or update your career development plan, which details how you aim to get there. This will involve organising and summarising much of the information that you have gathered during your work on this course into a set of action plans. Remember that you are being asked to engage in career development planning for a particular purpose within the context of this course – it doesn't need to fit with your current job or role.

Sorting out how you can go about achieving your career and personal goals may appear daunting. However, a good way to approach a large task is to devise an action plan that breaks it down into smaller chunks that are easier to handle – there's an example in Figure 7. If you take the goals you identified in Activity 9, you should be able to produce an action plan for each one. There are four factors to consider when drawing up your action plan:

1. what you need to do
2. how you are going to take action
3. resources that could help you (e.g. finance, information, friends)
4. when these resources will be available to you.

Maximise

Figure 7 Example action plan

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Figure 7 is a table entitled 'My goal: A degree within four years'. Below the title is a two-by-two grid as follows.

The top left box is labelled 'What?'. It contains two items: 'Need to do 60 points per year' and 'Allocate realistic time for study, i.e. 12 hours per week'.

The top right box is labelled 'How?'. It contains three items: 'Do breakdown of typical week', 'Note best and worst times of day for study' and 'Timetable in 12 hours using as much best time as possible, and think about which study tasks I might tackle during difficult times'.

The bottom left box is labelled 'Resources to help'. It contains three items: 'Tom, my line manager – to negotiate some study leave and/or flexible working hours', 'Katie – to add key family commitments to her timetable, e.g. parents' evenings' and 'Parents – to ask for help with children and garden'.

The bottom right box is labelled 'When?'. It contains three items: 'Talk to Tom during my appraisal on 10 June', 'Talk to Katie next weekend while children are at swimming lessons and do timetable' and 'Ask Mum and Dad over for a meal next week'.

Example action plan

Your action plan should also relate to the SWOT analysis you did in Activity 8 and the mission statement you put together in Activity 10. Try to view your action plans as the end product of all the recording, reviewing and reflection you've done throughout the career development process. But remember, in another sense the action plans you produce are simply a link in the chain; they have to be reviewed and, depending on the progress you've made and any changes in your circumstances, the action plans may have to change to accommodate revised aptitudes, interests, goals and values. For the purpose of this course, we have used the generic term of learning log; however, in the future, it doesn't really matter how you record and store the information, evidence and reflection accumulated in the career development planning process – as long as it is orderly and easily accessible. The important thing is to make sure that you go through each stage of the process on a regular basis.

In the final activity of this course, you will develop or update your career development plan.