Career planning

When it comes to planning your future career, it can feel pretty daunting.

Some of us might have a career goal in mind already, and others might feel overwhelmed by all the potential careers they can go into – and that’s ok! The purpose of showing you different career planning tools is to help you break down these big questions into smaller, more manageable stages.

Career planning can sound like something big and scary – but ultimately it’s the process of planning how you will achieve a professional goal and following through with those plans or steps. You start by identifying your main career/job goal and then work backwards to see how you might get there. What kind of things do you need to complete, research, and attend, to reach your goal?

In this course, I’ll be introducing you to a few career management strategies to get you started on this journey: DOTS, Squiggly Careers, Super Strengths, Golden Circles and Ikigai.

One of the most commonly used career management models in universities is called DOTS. I don’t mean the spots that you might find on a Dalmatian – this particular DOTS stands for:

• D – Decision Learning
• O – Opportunity Awareness
• T – Transition Learning
• S – Self-awareness

It can be more beneficial to complete this type of model in a different order

Self-awareness

It’s important to know who you are as a person. This means you would begin by assessing yourself. Think about things like your current values, interests, skills and personal qualities. You can then compare your list to the jobs you are looking at – do the things you’ve identified about yourself match the role or opportunity you want to pursue?

Opportunity awareness

Based on the values, interests, skills and personal qualities you have identified, you can explore lots of different sectors. Research them in detail, and look at the types of jobs and experiences on offer in these sectors that you can capitalise on. Do they align with the values/interests/skills/personal qualities you have identified? Will these opportunities help you reach your ultimate career goal (if you have one!)?

Decision learning

Next comes the hard part (if you’re someone like me, anyway) – making decisions! At this point you might need to narrow down your options, gain experience and connect with other people doing the job(s) you are interested in. Broaden your horizons and learn more about your sector of interest. You might need to pick out a few smaller goals to help reach your ultimate career goal.

Transition learning

And finally, you’ll need to decide exactly how you reach those goals. Think about: what does the process of applying to the job look like? How can you write the best application and succeed during the recruitment process?

This model intends to help you move to a fixed career destination – this is a fairly traditional way of career planning. There are, however, new approaches to career planning which are often more flexible – you’ll learn much more about this in the next lesson, and how your career might be less linear, and more wavy than you might have expected.

At the bottom of this step, you’ll find a workbook. Download this (even print it if you’d like!), as I’ll be asking you to complete different activities within the workbook in the different lessons of this course. There’ll also be lots of chances for discussion in this module – these are opportunities for you to share your thoughts with others on this course who are looking for work in North Yorkshire.