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How to Plan a Career Change

1st February 2017

When humans experience a threat, they either fight, flight or freeze. These responses come into play when we are offered change also. We can either stand up and tackle the change head on or, as most of us are guilty of, avoid the subject and park it in the ‘dream’ category.

It’s time to change your response and take control of your career, to do what makes you happy and comfortable on a daily basis. This article was published in January, the perfect time to re-evaluate your career and prepare for a pivot!

Here’s the 3 step career change plan

Decide what you want
Create a plan
Take action

Decide what you want

This is probably the biggest reason that many people are too afraid to make a change. Being unsure about where you see your career in the near future is not something to stress about, it’s natural. To begin to realise where you want to be, try asking (and answering) a few of these questions:

What part of your current role really gets you going?
What parts of it do you excel at?
And which are your weaknesses? (some people struggle to self-assess themselves fairly. If this is you, you can ask a close colleague to do this for you!)
Do you enjoy the office environment and the people inside it?
Is this one of the things holding you back?
What do you really not like about your role (Not just the processes you carry out, but the commuting time, people and benefits can also be listed)

Hopefully answering these questions will help you paint a clearer picture of your ideal role.

Create a plan

“The difference between a dream and a goal is a deadline”

How long have you been thinking about marking a career change but never followed through? Yeah, a while!

In such a hectic world that the current age has bought us and the ever-growing digital procrastinations fuelling our free time, setting deadlines to achieve your goals has never been more important. Holding yourself accountable and breaking your goal down will make is seem more manageable and achievable. The small-wins throughout the process will keep you continually motivated!

How to make your career change plan

Create your vision. The ideal position of where you want to be at the end of this process. Start with the phrase “I am” to get going in the right tense.
Draw a Timeline. On a sheet of A4 draw a straight line with your current position on the left and the vision on the right.
Break it up into smaller chunks. Make sure your milestones are small enough so as you can complete them on a fortnightly basis. Assign realistic dates to each.
Take your first goals and create a to-do list for each one. This only needs to be 3-5 points for each.

Now should have a stepping stone timeline that will give you some small wins to keep you motivated. It is time to get going…

Take action

This is the most important part of this process. The only difference between you and the person currently sitting at your vision, is the action you take today.

To start taking action, you need to be remind yourself of your goal daily and complete every small step to have a constant flow of motivation. Whenever you feel yourself slipping out of place, attempting to justify staying where you currently are, that is the point to take action (and by action, we are referring to one of the milestone to-dos above). Become self-aware and take advantage of this heuristic and choose action over complacency.