How to plan your career
Understanding the career planning process will give you a plan of action to work out your goals and make them achievable. It’s a strategy you’ll continuously develop to manage your learning and progression throughout your working life.
The career planning process can be divided into four parts.
- Know yourself: Ask yourself 'Where am I now?', 'Where do I want to get to?' and 'How do I get there?'. Think about what you enjoy, your interests, skills, and values to define your goals. See Career self-assessment.
- Explore opportunities: What type of job roles relate to your skills and interests? Look at what training and qualifications you'll need and where vacancies are advertised. See Jobs and work experience.
- Decide what to do: Plan how you'll reach your goal. Perhaps test out your interests in a voluntary capacity first. Be realistic in your expectations. See Career decision making.
- Take action: Gain some work experience, make networks, familiarise yourself with the general and graduate jobs market, research job opportunities. See Move forward with career plans.
Career readiness
The OU’s Careers and Employability Services use an approach called ‘career readiness’ to support you to put the career planning process into practice. It looks at four key career journey stages that you might find yourself in: discover, explore, achieve, and progress.
Discover – if you want to apply your study to changing your life, but don’t know how or where to start.
Explore – if you know what you’d love to do in life, but don’t know how to get there or find the wealth of information available overwhelming.
Achieve – if you’re ready to apply for opportunities but are struggling to breakthrough, are worried about interviews or assessment centres or just want an impactful CV.
Progress – if you’re not studying for career reasons but want to put your study to good use in the world or want to track your personal development in a more structured way.
Watch these short films of OU students sharing their experiences at the discover, explore, achieve and progress stage of their career journey. You'll need to be signed into your OU account to access these resources.
Work out your goals and next steps
We know that working out where you are in your career journey and what to do next can sometimes be difficult. The Navigate Your Future activity pathway in OpportunityHub takes you through a tailored set of activities that uses our career readiness approach to help you make sense of where you are with your career plans, navigate your options and work out what to do next.
The activity pathway narrows down your specific career or personal development needs, directs you to relevant careers resources and gives practical tasks and questions to help you clarify your goals and feel confident to move forward. It also saves your progress so you can dip in and out.
See information about signing into OpportunityHub if you’ve not used it before.
It's a great tool and easy to use. Going through the sequences made you feel like you were achieving something.
Quote from OU student who used the Navigate Your Future activity pathway
If, after working through the Navigate Your Future pathway, you're looking to explore your goals further, try the Career Readiness Pulse. This self-diagnostic tool can provide more insights and resources for additional exploration. If you're not sure how to sign-in, see Help with signing into OU systems. You'll find more information about our careers tools and services, including how to manage your data, in About the Careers and Employability Services.
