Choosing and Planning your Career Path

"Each of us is a completely unique creature. If we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's" - Joseph Campbell

The essence of career planning is finding a match between who you are and the environment that suits you. The first step is to know who you are, what you need and what your interests and talents are. Career planning is not a one-time event as students graduate and enter the world of work, but a dynamic on-going process of career development as you learn and respond to change, within yourself and in the organizations with which you work.

Often the expedience of needing a job compels young people to take whatever is easily available and most obvious. It is a rare person who is fortunate enough to match genuine interest, talents and values to a satisfying vocation offering appropriate growth opportunities in their first job. Taking the time to build a foundation of knowledge about yourself can increase your chances of success enormously.

• Interests, abilities and skills
• Values and work style
• Self confidence and attitude
• Outcome expectations

The CPS offers a full complement of career personality assessment instruments that help clarify educational and career directions. While most make a correlation between your attributes and related career fields, they do not provide the definite answer to “what should I have as a career?”. Instead, they are a tool to help you understand yourself and learn how your abilities and interests might fit into the world of work.

From your self-assessment, career exploration, research, and experience, a picture begins to emerge of the kind of work you would like to do and where you want to do it. Goal setting involves clarifying what you want and breaking it down into short-term and long-term goals. It is important that you are able to clearly articulate this information to employers, interviewers and other contacts you may need in pursuit of employment.

You need to be responsible about your career development process and no one else can or should be doing it. In order to grow and achieve new goals, don’t abandon the process. Continue to question and evaluate throughout your career life:

1. Where am I trying to get to?
2. Is this what I want?
3. What can I learn from this experience?

Look at both sides of every experience: positive and negative, from your point of view and a professional in the field.

• Getting into university is not the final step. It is a step but you need to think beyond your college years, your first job and into your future career path.
• Think of your career development as an evolving process that will change as you change.
• Realize that your first job/organization/industry does not determine the future course of your career. Statistics show that people today have 4-6 different jobs within1 or 2-3 different career fields during their work life.
• Be aware that your priorities will change throughout your career life. Your opinion regarding salary, location, and flexibility will also change.