“Your career is your business. It’s time for you to manage it as a CEO.” — Dorit Sher
7 Steps for Developing a Personal Career Strategy
- Self-Assessment – consider your interests, skills, values, personality, strengths, passions, and convictions in order to discern and understand what is truly important to you with respect to your career aspirations.
- Market Research – explore a wide range of industries, companies, functional areas, and job roles.
- Focus Your Career Goals – narrow your focus, and align your skills and interests with likely careers.
- Gap Analysis – identify gaps in your preparation (skills, knowledge or experience) which you will need to close in order to obtain your desired position. For each gap, identify specific actions you will take to enhance your skills and qualifications.
This is the appropriate time to examine the MBA course curriculum and available extra-curricular activities and plan your Program of Study in a way that builds your strengths and networks, bolsters areas where you lack experience, and otherwise fills the gaps. - Personal Marketing Plan – Incorporate your self-assessment, market research, career goals, and gap analysis into a plan for action. This is the time to develop an impactful cover letter and résumé, practice your elevator pitch, hone your communication and networking skills, and prepare a proactive and reactive job-search strategy. Basically, you need to define the critical path that will get you From Here → To There (i.e. Where you Want to Be).
- Implementation – Putting your Personal Career Strategy into action and executing your job search activities.
- Career Management – First impressions for interns and managing your first 90 days for graduates.
About Career Management
Career Management is a strategic, continuous process of setting professional goals, developing key skills, and leveraging networks and opportunities to advance one’s career.
Resources for Career Discovery
My Next Move
FREE. My Next Move is an interactive tool for job seekers and students to learn more about their career options.
My Next Move has tasks, skills, salary information, and more for over 900 different careers.
Career Leader
PAID. The personalized CareerLeader profile is a learning tool. It can be used to validate—or invalidate—assumptions about what is “ideal” in a career. The data can help you develop a path, or get unstuck from a career that is underway but not satisfying. Insights from the data will help you learn to leverage your strengths.
Career Dreamer
FREE. A playful way to explore career possibilities… from Google.
Career paths aren’t always straightforward, but your unique life experiences are a superpower. They’re full of valuable skills that employers need. Career Dreamer helps you uncover those skills and explore new career possibilities in a simple, playful way.
Whomi
PAID. Career plans
personalized for you.
Reach your next step by identifying your options, targeting your value, and engaging your network.
Resources for Job Search
V*Mock
The VMock platform delivers personalized career guidance to job seekers across the world.
See also JobScan.
HandShake
Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators,
Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs.
What people are saying
Ever Y. One“I should have used these resources years ago”
Tokyo, JP
Global Work Platforms
Mercor
An AI-powered platform that sources, vets, and pays your next employees. Full-time and hourly roles.
FlexJobs
The leading, most trusted site for finding work from home, remote, & flexible jobs in an easier, faster, and safer way.
80,000 Hours
A nonprofit that helps people use their careers to solve the world’s most pressing problems.