Welcome to this topic on Effective Career Planning and Decision Making

Good career decision making has three key stages: gathering information about yourself and your options, evaluating the facts and your priorities and then testing your decision before taking action. In this topic, we invite you to work through some activities to improve your knowledge and understanding of your own values as well those of potential employers and to explore how you can enhance your effectiveness as a career decision-maker.

A sustained, successful and rewarding career involves a good fit between your personal career values and the features of your chosen jobs and professional sectors. That good fit varies from person to person. It is worth taking some time to explore your own careers values so that your career planning and decision making is tailored to the authentic you. Some career values are easy to quantify such as a certain level of income, other values are much more subjective such as creativity.

Just as you have a personal value culture, so do professions and employers. These value cultures are developed from the purposes, practices and conventions of the work. You may have already encountered examples of professional values through your study. For example, those of you who are law students will have encountered study material and learning activities that encouraged you to think like a lawyer. If you have some work experience, either paid or unpaid, within a particular industry you may also have a greater understanding of the organisational values firms within that sector.

Large organisations made up of many professionals, also have values and cultures which you may find more or less compatible. It is worth learning to observe a job culture and evaluate how well it fits your own values and priorities. The first place to start that observation is to study how the organisation describes itself on its website where you will often find their mission and vision statements.

But it’s also very important to go beyond the company website. It is also very valuable to ask people already working in a sector to describe the culture of their profession or organisation which can help you evaluate whether it is a good fit for you. This gives you a more comprehensive and informed picture of what it would be like to actually work in that organisation. By making sure you engage in the key stages of Research/Reflect/Test/Evaluate you are more likely to make informed and sustainable career decisions.

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"Shanghai Urban Planning Center"by Remko Tanis is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Last modified: Tuesday, 1 December 2020, 4:38 PM