Making a career plan is not really difficult. The key to success is grasping five steps as follows:

At this step, self-assessment questions will help you to understand yourself more thoroughly. Such questions take various forms, but the most common ones are as follows:

+ Is a high salary important to you?

+ What types of jobs do you enjoy doing?

+ What makes your job important to you?

+ How do you describe yourself?

+ What skills have you had?

+ What training courses have you attended (or wish to attend)?

If you want something more professional, you can use career tests such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to know what types of jobs suited to your type.

You need to specify long-term and short-term career goals in your ideal jobs. However, it is critical that they should correspond to your interests, passion and capabilities. Only when you do activities you love and are good at, can you attain true achievements in your jobs.

After specifying your goals, you should find out the jobs ideally suited to your demand and interests. Visiting recruitment websites can help you to find out the jobs available on the labour market at the moment as well as current hiring demand. Additionally, you should extend your network on social networking sites such as . Ask your friends who work in the industries questions such as: What are their responsibilities and duties? What skills are essential to their jobs? How are promotion prospects? To make this task easier, you need to update your PRO-file, which lists employment and educational background, expertise and professional achievements.

The critical moment has come! This is the right time for you to make a list of your most favourite jobs and grade them according to the criteria such as values, interests, personality, skills … The job which gets the highest marks will be your top priority. If that ideal job is your current one, from now on, you can invest all your effort in getting ! On the contrary, you should take changing jobs into consideration (probably moving to other departments).

You ought to specify much-needed knowledge and skills to attain your goals with level of priority and deadlines. In addition, you should confidently state to your manager that you are ready to take more responsibilities. Conversely, if you are still looking for your ideal jobs, update your old resumes or create new ones. After that, you should keep track of job information and research career advice section on newspapers or recruitment websites to grab new career opportunities and hone your skills in finding jobs.

Have you ever heard of the saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”? Obviously, a career plan will help you to see clearly goals and actions you need to take to decide your own career future. Therefore, you should invest considerable time and effort in making this plan! This is surely one of your wisest investments in the New Year!