How to Create a Career Success Plan You'll Actually Use

Are you new to career planning or are you sick of using templates that don't actually help you achieve your career goals? In this post, I'm going to be sharing with you the career success process that actually works.

Let's Be Real About Career Planning...

I've been through the useless snoozefest process that is annual career planning at most organizations.

You know the one, you usually sit down with your manager once a year, and together you define the things that you're going to work on. Usually, it's oriented towards the goal for the company, or in most cases actually oriented towards improving yourself. So you're finding the thing that you're least good at, and you're creating goals to actually change that thing.

The thing is, once you actually create this plan, it usually gets put into a file somewhere on your computer, or if you're old school, a physical location, and you never look at it again until one year later, when it comes to annual review time.

And then what usually happens is you have a good laugh, either just to yourself, or with your manager about how hilariously off the mark all of those goals and intentions were.

But also you realize that you didn't make any progress on the things that you intended to make progress on it all.

The process that I'm going to share with you is about setting intention, and structure into actually achieving what you want to in your career. Whether you're looking to get a promotion, transition into a new role, or become an authority within your industry, this career success plan is going to help you get exactly there.

Best of all - you'll want to utilize it on a regular basis. It's actually going to be one of the most useful tools that you create for yourself.

This is actually a sample of what I do with my clients in my Career Accelerator. But this is so important that I really want every ambitious professional to have it, and hence, I'm sharing it with you today.

Begin with the end in mind

This is actually one of the principles of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (here's my affiliate link if you're interested in buying the book - also feel free to look it up on Amazon). If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it to every professional.

The huge benefit of beginning with the end in mind is if you start where you are, you're not always sure of where you want to go and the steps required to get there.

However, if you've defined your career vision, you know where your ultimate destination is. Now you can actually reverse engineer the steps and milestones in order to get you there, which we're going to do in this process. If you read my last post, and you've already created your career vision, you have this step 50% squared away.

Now there's one more thing that I do recommend that you include here, though it is actually optional in your career success plan. Define your values; who you want to be as you make this ascent through your career.

This is actually getting a little bit into having a professional mission statement or a personal mission statement. The reason that I love having this combination of your values and your vision is it's really going to help you not just set the milestones that you need to follow in order to reach your destination. It's also going to help you when we get into the points where you're planning out the specific tasks in order to get you there.

Because who you want to be, your strengths, and who and how you want to be known really plays a critical role in creating the right plan to get there.

And having the right plan in place is really the differentiator between the plan that you use, and the one that ends up in the file being absolutely useless.

Define your success metrics