The Career Planning Process
Taking It Step-By-Step
By Dawn Rosenberg McKay, About.com
What is Career Planning?
Career planning is a lifelong process, which includes choosing an occupation, getting a job, growing in our job, possibly changing careers, and eventually retiring. The Career Planning Site offers coverage of all these areas. This article will focus on career choice and the process one goes through in selecting an occupation. This may happen once in our lifetimes, but it is more likely to happen several times as we first define and then redefine ourselves and our goals.
Career Planning: A Four Step Process
The career planning process is comprised of four steps. One might seek the services of a career development professional to help facilitate his or her journey through this process. Whether or not you choose to work with a professional, or work through the process on your own is less important than the amount of thought and energy you put into choosing a career.
Self
Gather information about yourself (self assessment)
* Interests
* Values
* Roles
* Skills/Aptitudes
* Preferred Environments
* Developmental Needs
* Your realities
Options
* Explore the occupations in which you are interested
* Research the industries in which you would like to work
* Research the Labor Market
Get more specific information after you narrow down your options by:
* Job Shadowing
* Part time work, internships, or volunteer opportunities
* Written materials
* Informational interviews
Match
During this phase of the process, you will:
* Identify possible occupations
* Evaluate these occupations
* Explore alternatives
* Choose both a short term and a long term option
Action
You will develop the steps you need to take in order to reach your goal, for example:
* Investigating sources of additional training and education, if needed
* Developing a job search strategy
* Writing your resume
* Gathering company information
* Composing cover letters
* Preparing for job interviews
Using Your Network
Thursday September 25, 2008
Many people think about networking only when it comes to a job search. The saying "it's not what you know, it's who you know" usually refers to using your connections to get a job or to move up the corporate ladder. Smart people, though, use their network in many other ways.
Take for example a colleague of mine who needed some information about the pre-teen and teen phenomenon, High School Musical. Having no children that age herself, she was not well-acquainted with this series of television movies, an upcoming feature film and a gizillion licensed products (some of us know a little too much about it). I guess she could have done some research and found information on the Web. There is certainly plenty — a Google search yields 66,500,000 hits. Smart as my colleague is, she knew she could do better than that. Why should she have to sift through all that stuff, much of it irrelevant, when she could go directly to the source — the actual fans.
So, my colleague went to her network to find out if any of us have kids who are High School Musical fans. She hit the jackpot and got many responses to her request. Several of us had kids who are fans of HSM, as it is known to its target audience. She was able to ask them some very focused questions in order to get just what she needed. What a great example of using your network for something other than job searching.
参考资料：http://careerplanning.about.com/