Managing your career
Discover the importance of developing effective career management strategies to support your career development.
Learning how to manage your career and adapt to change has never been more important. In an increasingly technological and globalised 21st century, the world of work continues to evolve at rapid pace. The idea of a job for life is much less prevalent now, as the workforce becomes more mobile, the workplace becomes more flexible and the job market becomes more fluid. These advances have brought with them many new jobs – jobs that didn’t even exist a few years ago! While this has resulted in more choice for the workforce, navigating your career journey has become increasingly complex.
Consider where you are now on your career journey;
- Do you have a clear plan for the future?
- Do you have several ideas and are currently working out which career might suit you the best?
- Do you have absolutely no idea what you want to do and feel a bit clueless? This is perfectly normal and a lot more common than you probably think!
Whatever stage you’re at, university provides the perfect platform to fine-tune your decision-making and plan for a successful future, whatever that looks like for you. What’s important to understand at this stage is that whatever you decide to do after graduation doesn’t have to be the thing you do for your whole career!
Finding the skills you need to manage your career
It can be useful to think about your career as an on-going project that you are responsible for managing. Just like a project manager, you need a strong set of skills to manage your career – we call these career management skills.
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Career planning
You don’t have to have the next twenty years mapped out but creating a short-term career plan can be really helpful with your early career development. It can give you a sense of direction and something to work towards even if you’re not sure what you want to do just yet.
We recommend following this 4-stage DOTS model (Law B., Watts A.G., 2003) to help get you started with some structured career planning:
Making decisions on your future is not easy. Knowing all the options and understanding which ones best suit you can seem overwhelming at times. What's important is to gather as much information as possible. Making well-informed decisions typically leads to making good decisions.
Use your time at university to research a wide range of careers, even if you're pretty certain you know what you want to do. There's no harm in having at least one back up plan! Use websites like Prospects and TargetJobs to research sectors, organisations and jobs and check out our advice on researching career options for further help.
Think about the skills and experience you have now. How does this align with the careers you're currently thinking about? What areas of development do you have and how are you going to work towards developing them? Undertaking a SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis on your own professional development can be a really helpful exercise. Once completed, list the actions that you need to take to address any gaps.
To understand what will lead to a successful and rewarding career, you first need to understand what your values, motivations and interests are. What things are likely to make you really happy in a job? What are your non-negotiables? Identify what you are good at, what you enjoy and what's important to you. Check out our advice on developing your self-awareness to help you get started.
Making a career decision
You’ll find yourself facing career choices and decisions here at Cardiff University and throughout your working life that will have a varying impact on your career and future direction. Whether it’s deciding between different career options or deciding to accept a job offer, being able to make a good career decision is a skill you can develop over time.
We don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect decision – not in life, and not in your career! It is almost impossible to tell if a decision has turned out for the best until after the decision has been made and you can reflect on the outcome. Even if a decision doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, what you learn from the process can still be incredibly valuable for your career.
In order to help you make the right decisions at the right times, consider using the following strategies;
Reflect on past decisions
Think about how you have made decisions in the past, for example, coming to university and choosing which course to study. Reflect on how you have approached those decisions and the factors that were important to you. Think about decisions you made that turned out to be really good ones. What approach did you take and how do you think it helped?
Speak to friends and family
Sounding out your options and ideas to people that know you and that you trust can be incredibly impactful, even if only to give you an opportunity to discuss them out loud rather than just thinking about them in your head!
Where possible, try to get a range of opinions so that you get a well balanced set of views. As already mentioned, the more information you have, the better informed your decision. Just make sure you don't get pressured into making any decisions. It's your future, the ultimate decision has to be yours and yours alone.
Visualise your future self
By visualising where we see ourselves in the future and what we imagine we'll be doing when we're at our happiest, we can make the most effective decisions. This can take some time and effort and you need to have developed your understanding of what you want from your career first.
Start by looking at our advice on building your self-awareness. The Muse website also has a useful guide to using visualisation to help with your career.
Weigh up the pros and cons
Writing a list of the advantages and disadvantages (or pros and cons as we call them) of a decision can be really useful. However, rather than making your decision based on the number of pros and cons, we suggest you also factor in the importance of each of those pros and cons to you personally.
To do a weighted pros and cons list, assign each pro and con a value between 1 and 10 (with 1 being not important at all and 10 being very important). Add up the values of all of the pros and cons at the end and compare the total number for each column - this will give you are more accurate reflection of the importance of the pros and cons that you have identified.
Have options
It can be helpful and reassuring to have multiple options on the table when it comes to making career decisions. Whether that's considering different roles, working in different sectors or having multiple job offers to consider. Having options can usually help you to weigh up the pros and cons of each more easily and it's great for your confidence when you know you have a really strong back up alternative!
Book an appointment with a Careers Adviser
Speaking to a Careers Adviser can be a really good way of getting an impartial and confidential view from someone who is an expert in career management and solely focused on helping you make the best decision for you.
Booking an appointment is easy, just log onto your Student Futures Account and find a time that suits.