Create A Professional Career Development Plan In Time For New Year
Now is the perfect time to review your professional goals and career mindset as we head into 2024. To keep your career on the path to success, it’s important to continually grow and recognise areas for improvement or additional support. Here’s our top tups for development a professional career development plan to help you get started.
What is a career development plan?
A Career Development Plan (CDP) will help you be planned and deliberate about your development in your current and future role. It will help you work towards your personal goals and aspirations by helping you identify these, set out your learning objectives, and help track your progress throughout your learning and development journey.
Why do I need one?
Establishing a professional development plan (PDP) will act as your GPS for determining where you want to go in your career and what resources you need to aid you in your journey.
Building better awareness of how you contribute to your team and are perceived as a leader or team member is a key piece to preparing for and developing into senior-level positions. Finding the right mentor who can conduct a 360-degree assessment to provide feedback will reveal your strengths and areas for progression.
It will also help you to identify what others’ perception is of your strengths and weaknesses so that you can create an action plan to implement a strategy that will allow you to grow as an employee.
What to include
You (or your coach/mentor) can consider each one of your skillsets, and how you could improve your performance. Also finding a way to sharpen your skills and acknowledge your accomplishments as you grow can be a great way to keep an open mind for future high-performance job role opportunities.
Resources can offer unlimited support and bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to be. Think about your learning style (do you prefer in-person coaching versus an online platform?), your timeline (how long will it take for you to gain the skills you need?), and your budget. What is the most effective strategy to help you achieve your goals?
Remember to revisit your goals once every two to three months to track your progress.
You may find it useful to try some of our career planning tools: https://stockport-jobsmatch.co.uk/student-and-teacher-resources/
