An expert gave advice on how to make a career plan

Drawing up a career plan is a serious and responsible job. But it is something that will ultimately lead to the achievement of career goals as quickly and efficiently as possible, Olga Petrovskaya, head of the Finance and Investment practice at CORNERSTONE recruiting company, told Izvestia on January 25. She gave several tips on creating the right tactics.

"A properly drawn up career plan will become your GPS navigator in a difficult and highly competitive labor market, will not allow you to turn aside, will motivate and support you on this path," - said the expert.

She explained that a career plan is a clearly described steps that define the trajectory of movement to achieve a career goal: to take a position in a certain company or business segment, to change the place of work, to change the field of activity, to launch a business, to create your own startup project.

"At first glance it looks quite simple - write a desired position in a desired company and aspire to go there. But in reality, the process of competently drawing up a career plan that will truly allow you to move from point A to point B is quite a serious and responsible endeavor that requires a lot of preparation. To draw up a career plan, you can turn to a career counselor, or you can draw it up yourself," Petrovskaya added.

According to her, a competent career plan should meet certain requirements, namely: to help always be focused on future achievements; to teach to take responsibility for career development solely on oneself; to focus on success; to help develop and realize professionally; to move forward.

A career plan consists of three important components: setting a goal, building a career path, and evaluating yourself and your resources. Each point should be given a lot of attention, the expert explained.

"First of all, you should outline your career goal in an outcome format that meets the SMART criteria. That is, the goal should be realistic, achievable, measurable, it should have set time parameters for its achievement and there should be clearly defined criteria by which you can determine that the goal has been achieved (certain details that you will then check against - it may be a description of the desired role, area of responsibility, income level or other parameters that are important to you)," Petrovskaya said.

She also explained that competent construction of a career track is the key to success. Building a career track includes five stages. The first one is determining one's strengths, talents, blind spots and growth areas. This is an assessment of yourself, your competencies, your hard and soft skills. Secondly, based on this assessment, it is necessary to identify areas and directions where there is a greater chance of success. It is more correct to emphasize strengths - this way the probability of achieving the goal is much higher, the expert said. If the goal is a direction where objectively a person lacks skills, it is necessary to clearly understand what skills should be acquired.

Then it is necessary to set a career goal. And then plan steps to achieve this goal - to break down the big goal into sub-goals. After that, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of the career track in the Agile format. According to the expert, it's important to pay attention to your sub-goals, making adjustments to the career plan as needed.

"When you have a career goal outlined and a career plan written, it's important to take the time to not only devote time to external resources that directly impact career building (education, additional training, certifications, courses), but also to your internal resources that you will tap into throughout your career track. These are the competencies that will help you build interaction, manage a team, make difficult decisions, motivate and lead a team," Petrovskaya added.

She specified that, based on the career goal and career plan, it is possible to make a wheel of competencies - those qualities that will need to be developed throughout the career path. These qualities are different, they are not unified, but there are often those that are more common, such as engagement, teamwork, self-organization, management skills, the expert said.

Earlier, January 15, it was reported that every third Russian respondent (28%) planned to change jobs in 2025. This is stated in the results of the study of the Russian School of Management. Respondents who are thinking about such changes, told about the reasons. Among the most frequent ones are low salary (47% of respondents said so), lack of opportunities for professional growth (45%), lack of career prospects (39%), dissatisfaction with management (24%), dissatisfaction with the team (8%).