Do You Have a Career Plan?

While their intentions are good, some people who are in a position to advise or mentor technicians about their careers, really over complicate things. With the likes of personality assessments, one, three, six and twelve month goals, three, five and ten year goals, educational goals, productivity goals, goals for goals…it can all get very confusing.

Some technicians are in a position to write out a formal career plan that might include some of the above. If so, great. For the rest of us, lets take a small step towards creating a career plan.

For those of you who know or have a pretty good idea of where you want to go and what you want to do:

• Write the statement in your notebook – I want to be ______  or  I want to do________

For those of you who are not sure, choose one role or job in your company and plan to specialize in it. You’re not deciding what you want to do the rest of your life. You’re just choosing one role and you’re choosing to specialize in it. The cool thing about this direction is that once you make the effort to specialize and begin to do things to accomplish it, you’ll most certainly get a better feel for what you’d like to do more long term.

• Write the statement in your notebook – I want to______

If you write out one of the two statements suggested above, you’ll have started to design a career plan, and be further along than ninety-five percent of all the other technicians in your industry.