Short messages on Employment and jobs from Respect Yourself, the guidance site for young people to help make good decisions in life.
If you’re starting a new job, try to prioritise completing tasks that complement your existing skills (so you can feel good about doing them well), and that allow you to build a rapport with your new co-workers.
Once you’ve established a series of goals, figure out ways to evaluate your progress. Your career development plan is a tool to keep you on track. You want to make sure you have concrete ways to assure you’re where you want to be at any given time.
Once you’ve identified your obstacles, figure out how you want to overcome them. What tasks and growth can you do to make sure you’ll reach your goals despite setbacks?
You may be a disorganised person by nature, making it hard to keep up with things like student email and homework. You could add this to your ‘barriers’ list as something like, “Being disorganised reduces the time I have available for my tasks”.
All goals come with barriers. It’s good to go into your career path with a realistic sense of what could potentially hold you back. Make a list of potentially barriers that keep you from achieving the short- and long-term goals in your career path.
After you’ve honestly assessed where you currently are in your career, you can plot out a route of where you want to be, including milestones, to reach your ultimate career goal.
When thinking about your career, think about what skills you already have, whether you learned them from work, school or hobbies, and what you’re naturally good at. Think about what your main motivation is – are you driven by passion, the aspiration for success, or something else?
To write a career development plan, start by writing down your primary field of interest. For example, “My primary career interest is teaching at secondary school level.”
A career development plan is a useful tool to help you progress deliberately through a specific career path. You will critically consider where you are in your career, where you’d like to be, how you think you can get there, and how you’ll measure your actions.
In the UK, 43% of retirement income comes from company pensions and 40% from state pensions/benefits. Saving early into a company pension gives your investment more time to grow.