Whether you're looking to ascend the career ladder quickly or strengthen your skillset, a well-defined career roadmap can help you achieve your career objectives.
“Ask yourself if what you’re doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.”
~Anonymous
Do you want to improve your current career situation or make a new career choice? Not sure where to start? Creating a career path can be your first step to career success.
There can be many ways towards a job or professional role you want to pursue and a sharp career roadmap offers a viable approach for a faster career progression.
Why Having a Career Roadmap is Important?
A career roadmap provides a lifelong direction to focus on the right career according to your skills and traits and manage your achievements. It constitutes short- and long-term milestones. It acts like a map of successive roles you need to go through to reach your ultimate goal.
A career roadmap has many benefits; a few of the prominent ones are listed below:
● Identify and target the right jobs
● Gives you a sense of purpose
● Determine and fill knowledge and skill gaps
● Increase your cumulative ability and experience
● Get competent with other professionals in your industry
● Consider more factors than monetary aspects for your career
5 Effective Strategies to Create a Career Roadmap
Statistics on SurveyMonkey show that 37% of employees seek better career options on offer. A career roadmap tells you about the steps you need to take to reach a professional goal or accelerate your career progression with better career options.
If you are also seeking adequate opportunities for advancement in the workplace, you need to create a career roadmap by following these strategies.
1. Define Your Right Career as a Starting Point
There are so many career options out there and you need to find the right career for you by following an organised process. Your current position at your workplace can serve as your roadmap’s beginning. Think about what your dream job or ideal career is. When you identify your starting point along with the desired destination, you can think about a practical path to reach there from your current professional position.
2. Learn More About Your Ultimate Career Goal and its Requirements
After establishing your ultimate career goals, you need to find other relevant factors necessary to perform well in the corresponding professional role like the qualifications, skills and experience. These insights help outline the requirements of the job.
Follow these five thoughtful pieces of advice to discover a career you love. Also, use the following areas to learn more about the requirements for your desired job:
○ Comprehend job descriptions in detail
○ Interact with professionals working in the desired role
○ Cases of succession preparation and planning
○ Training and mentorships sessions
3. Take the Necessary Steps Towards Your Career Goals
As you derive the relevant information about the roles and requirements for the desired job, proceed to add appropriate action steps to connect your roadmap’s beginning and end goals. Hiring an executive coach can be very helpful to you to create a detailed plan of action for achieving your goals. This approach acts as a resource for motivation and also helps in identifying the areas you need to focus on and develop for your desired job.
4. Track Your Progress Using Key Performance Indicators
Once you begin your journey according to your career roadmap, keep assessing your progress with respect to key performance indicators. Define appropriate time-bound benchmarks like joining a particular job and getting a promotion in the corresponding department, and use them as lagging and leading indicators to measure your career progression.
5. Refine and Keep Your Career Roadmap Up to Date
An effective career roadmap is modified on the basis of situation, challenges and progress plan. Explore and examine your fears and challenges to overcome them. Assess and recalibrate your actions and schedule regularly. That tactic ensures your career roadmap is engaging and easy to follow and effectively deals with any challenges or even mistakes you made during your journey.
A thoughtful career path plan is key to planning and preparing for grabbing suitable jobs and opportunities according to your knowledge, skills, and experience. Learn how to create your own career roadmap and push your career trajectory on a path full of success.
Are you in the right job? Take the Free 'Are You in The Right Career Assessment’ to identify whether you are in the right job and discover what type of jobs you will excel at. The results of this test will be your guide towards a successful career change.
Smita D Jain is a Certified Life Coach, Executive Coach and NLP Practitioner. Smita’s ‘Empower Yourself’ Personal Clarity Coaching Programs enable busy professionals unhappy in their jobs to tap into their passions and transform them into professions so that they work because they want to, not because they have to.
Before her journey as a coach, Smita had extensive experience of 14 years as a corporate and business strategy professional with Fortune 500 companies. She is also a speaker at various public forums, a published writer, and an Amazon bestselling author.
You can learn more about Personal Empowerment Life Coach and Executive Coach Smita D Jain’s ‘Empower Yourself’ Coaching Programs by visiting www.lifecoachsmitadjain.com and book a strategy session at https://www.lifecoachsmitadjain.com/booking.
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