Go For The Grand Plan

Breaking down your overall career goal into a series of smaller, more achievable sub-goals will help you to get there. It’s like planning a journey from where you live to somewhere you’ve never driven before. Simply knowing that you need to ‘drive to Glasgow’ doesn’t actually help you to get there. But breaking it down – ‘drive to the local town center, then locate the main road, drive ten kilometers, then get onto the motorway until you get to Junction 10 . . .’ and so on – will clarify the steps you need to take, making it easier to achieve your overall goal.

Devise your action plan

Try to break your career goals into the sub-goals that you need to take. And for each sub-goal, think about the following questions:

• What do you plan to achieve?
• How will you go about achieving it? What will you actually do?
• Who else might you need to get involved? What support or intervention can they offer you?
• When will you do this? Is it something that you can do quickly – or is it something much longer term?

Once you’ve done this, you will have a draft action plan. You will never have a finalized and definitive action plan because, as the weeks and months pass, you will need to keep checking that your actions are still appropriate.

For instance, you may be doing something completely different in a year’s time from what you do now. If that’s the case, you will need to go back to Chapter 1 to rethink your life mission, and then come back to this chapter to think about the implications for your action plan.

And, as you read the further chapters of this book, hopefully you will get more and more ideas about the kinds of skills you need and the activities you should engage in to help you achieve your career goals. So you will need to revisit this section several times to keep updating your plan of action.