You may consider pursuing a career at some point in life. If you live in India, a career idea is commendable, especially when considering the various opportunities present in industries and sectors in the country.
However, you need to have a written career plan, as that allows you to convert your ideas into actionable tasks. Such plans let you bring your dreams to reality, but how do you go about writing a great one?
SMART is an effective goal-setting method you can use. It's an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. The method lets you set your career path more clearly.
In this piece, we show you how you can use the SMART strategy to develop an excellent career plan. Let's get started.
Going by the SMART goal-setting method, the most effective way to begin writing your career plan is by making it Specific, just as the first letter of the word denotes.
That means you crystallize your dreams and visions into macro plans. What are macro plans? Think of them as the more significant career subject under which your smaller goals fall. For instance, you want to become a software engineer or a hardware analyst.
Take note that your macro plans have to be specific. If you're interested in the Indian tech ecosystem, choose a particular field in which you want to major.
After covering the macro plans, you'd want to spell out the micro plans afterward. Since we're still following the SMART format, micro plans are a way for you to measure and quantify your career plans.
Essentially, your macro plan is your career aim, while the micro plans are the objectives that help you through. Depending on where you're starting, your micro plans can include:
Also, micro plans ground you better, and you have something to look forward to each day concerning your career.
There's nothing wrong with dreaming big about your career, but is it actionable? It's important that your plans keep you motivated down the line. As such, you'd want to keep from moot plans like becoming Google's CEO in five years, for instance.
Instead of saying you'd like the lead role at Google in five years, you can start by planning to get an entry-level position at Google in the same period. That's a much more actionable standpoint, and you can proceed to loftier projections from there.
What knowledge base and resources are available to achieve your career goals today? Your plans need to be realistic enough to be achievable with the current resources you have or can get in a definite time.
For instance, it's not realistic if your career goals require you to spend an indeterminate amount of research time. In the Indian tech space, you need to have the right resources to ensure that you understand your career requirements better. Anything beyond that, and you might have to reconsider your plans altogether.
Last but not least, the SMART method of writing a career plan is to have a time-bound structure. All your goals need to exist in a timeline, or they'd become unrealistic. Also, you've got to allow enough time to actualize your plans, as too much or little may cause failure.
How do you develop a proper timeline for your goals? By accounting for the days, weeks, months, and years. An easy way is to have short and long-term timelines for each goal, with their appropriate requirements.
Career goals are essential for personal development as they give you a sense of responsibility and fulfilment. In a robust economy like India's, you can take advantage of the various career opportunities available at whatever level you are in your industry.
But you'll still have to make an effort to seize the opportunity. That's why you need a great career plan, and SMART is one effective method you can use to write one, as we have explained above.