Creating a Career Pathway Plan

Creating a Career Pathway Plan will help you plan for your career goal(s) – including understanding the skills, experience and qualifications required to achieve them.

As part of Post-16 Careers Week, we’ve created a series of tools to help young people identify and plan for their next steps after school or college. You can use these anytime – whether you’re choosing your GCSE options, deciding between A-Levels or Apprenticeships, applying for University or looking for your first job.

Our Career Pathway Plan can be used as part of your own individual research to track your progress or as part of careers provision at school, college or during further training/studies elsewhere. If you have one specific career goal in mind, use the Career Pathway Plan to make a list of what’s required to achieve it and the targets, or milestones, you’ll need to meet along the way. If you’re not sure, it’s useful to have several Career Pathway Plans to begin with. Once you’ve researched different career options, you can then narrow this down based on what interests you most.

It’s also handy at other stages of your career – whether you need to reskill or change direction!

Download your Career Pathway Plan here 

How to create your Career Pathway Plan

1. Start by filling in your name and ‘My Goal’. Your goal could be your end career/ideal job, or it could simply be the next step in your career journey e.g. ‘go to college’ or ‘get a degree’ for example. If you’re unsure of what your goal should be, why not use our Career Guides and Employer Videos to find out more about what’s on offer locally?

If you’re completing your Career Pathway Plan as part of Post-16 Careers Week activities, you can use our Event Prospectus to find out more about our Virtual Exhibitors or view our video, quizlet and presentation on Career Pathways in Stockport and the current jobs market.

2. Next, make a list of the skills, qualifications and experience you’ll need to achieve to start working towards your career goal. You can use the career guides and employer videos referenced above or our job search function (filtering by sector) to look at job adverts for live vacancies. These usually include a section called ‘person specification’ which will explain the ‘desirable’ and ‘essential’ criteria (like skills, knowledge and qualifications) required to apply for or undertake the job. 

You can also explore thousands of career/job profiles using the National Careers Service website or Prospects Career Tools.

3. Identify the tools you’ll need along the way and check these off. For example, whether you’re applying for college, university, an apprenticeship, traineeship, training course, or job, you’ll need:

• A CV (you can download different CV templates for free here)
• Job Profile (try our Career Guides for more information)
• Support Network (to help you transition to your next steps, get help with your wellbeing or perhaps more specialist support for young people)
• Careers Advice (such as a Careers Advisor, Mentor, Work Coach)

4. Finally, set your ‘Targets’ or milestones you need to meet to achieve your end goal. This could include choosing your GCSE options, researching college courses and attending open days, submitting your application and attending a transition day for example. Or it could include finding a mentor in your chosen industry, gaining work experience, developing required behaviours through extra curricular activities (like confidence or team-working), and creating a CV to demonstrate these.

Once you’ve completed your Career Pathway Plan

You can change or update your Career Pathway Plan as often as you like. Once you’ve completed it, you should have achieved the following learning objectives:

 Researched and identified a career goal (or several!) by learning about local employers and job profiles

 Identified the skills you’ll need to pursue your goal, as well as recognising those you already have

Researched the qualifications required and thought about what grades you need in your current studies to achieve these

Considered the skills, behaviours and work experience required to take your next step, including examples of how you have demonstrated these skills in your existing academic pursuits or extra-curricular activities, or what you need to do to acquire them (such as volunteering, projects or activities)