Planning Your Career: What Do You Think About Your Possibilities?

The way you can pass into your career can be proactive and reactive.

The reactive one is the way of random and expectations "from outside". If a company makes you an offer, you just react to it, and if you're lucky, you're in. If you don't have any money, you just go working; actually, you don't want to do this, but you do this because you're just reacting on your empty wallet. So, if you lose your work or your money... you're just reacting to this by getting unemployed and poor.

The proactive approach gives us the opportunity of proper planning and learning your activities for your career.

• Can't decide what should you do on your new job? Use your opportunity to learn skills met with your or your company's needs and personal/corporate mission.
• Can't figure out what you apply your past skills for? Learn for new working opportunities that use your past skills with unusual way.
• Can't get a promotion? You can create a plan to gather all the skills you need to become a boss! :)

That's how you can avoid any random and lacks of luck in your way to success.

Of course, your plan needs to be realistic and contain the SMART goals (YES, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound - you may have heard it somewhere before :) )

According to Dr. Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset: changing the way you think to fulfill your potential", there are two groups of people with different mindsets, the "fixed" and the "growth" one. People with the first one assured that they born with the set of skills they just CAN'T change. People with the "growth" mindset always look for ways to improve themselves by learning something new. Try to guess which group is proactive, and which one is reactive :)

I think our possibilities are really wide. We can't judge ourselves by who we are right now or what family we were born in. So, thinking about your possibilities of your actual job, or even whey you're unemployed is a basic step toward success.

Of course, you may not want to work on your plan alone. There are people around you (ex. your colleagues) who might be happy to help you. For example, get your buy-in from your line manager who needs you to be more productive at your work! Your job also might consider some on-the-job or formal trainings, and you can try online courses to learn all the skills you need!

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Vocabulary (you may add your explanations of words of this post!)

• Probationary period = trial period.
• nagging, ~aching - when something hurts you, and you try to ignore this feeling but you actually can't. And you feel blue :)
• Line manager = supervisor.
• thorough, ~detailed, ~comprehensive - something that you made seriously by high-quality work and deep learning.
• formal management - management as a science of realizing business-processes from plan to result.
• to cover your work - that's what you ask your colleagues for if you're gonna leave your work until it ends :)
• "to sustain change and growth", ~to promote, ~to support - something you do to be sure that your plan will lead you to gain changes and growth in your work.
• (idiom) "gain buy-in from your manager" - your manager lets you to learn skills important for your work and your organization.