Setting the stage. Work through the following questions to help you to think about your career development and to refine your goals so that they are specific, relevant, and most importantly, inspiring to you. You have to want to achieve them!

1. What do you want to achieve? What is your objective?

2. Why do you want to achieve this objective? What’s important to you about it?

3. What difference would achieving your objective make to you personally?

4. What difference would achieving your objective make to your future career?

5. How will you know when you’ve achieved your objective?

6. What would success look like for you and your career when you’ve achieved your objective?

Defining your current skill sets. In order to move towards to achieving your objective, it’s important to have a good understanding of where you are now, as well as what skills and knowledge you’ve already attained. By having a clear idea of what you want to achieve (step 1, above) and where you are now (step 2), you’ll find it much easier to map a path between the two. The following questions will help you to assess the reality of your current situation:

1. Where are you now?

2. What are your current skills / areas of expertise / competencies?

3. What are your strengths? What do you do well?

4. Which areas do you consider to be your development areas? What could you be better at?

5. What skills, knowledge or behavior do you need to develop in order to achieve your objective?

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Research your career options. While you’ve learned where you are now and what is that you want to achieve you can begin researching careers you think may align best with you. You will come across position titles, and discover the skills, educational requirements, and personal attributes needed to be successful in various fields. Gathering this information will help you make decisions for majors, jobs, and careers that would fit in with your interests and skills.

Prioritize your career options. It’s not enough to list options. You have to prioritize. Just like in Step 1, remind yourself of what are your top skills? What interests you the most? What’s most important to you? Whether it’s intellectually challenging work, family-friendly benefits, the right location or a big paycheck, it helps to know what matters to you — and what’s a deal-breaker.

Develop your skills. Once you are clear about where you are going (your prioritized career options) and how far you have to go to get there (what those careers require versus what skillsets you currently have), it’s time to review all of the options open to you to help you bridge the gap. Work through each option in turn, identifying the pros and cons. Here are some questions to help you get started in understanding how you can bridge the gap between you career objective’s requirements and your current skillsets:

1. Which skills / knowledge / behaviors do you want to develop?

2. Which of the skills / knowledge / behaviors that you have chosen could be quick wins and which will take longer to achieve?

3. What things can you do to make an impact to your skills and career development straight away?

4. Who can help / support / coach or mentor you to enable you to achieve your career objectives?

5. What training or development is easily accessible to you?

6. Which skills / knowledge / behaviors can you develop now?

7. Where will you look for additional ways of developing your skills?

Bridge the gap. The final and most important stage of putting together your career plan is about committing to what action you are actually going to take. Your career plan is likely to include a number of separate actions, some of which will be quicker and easier to complete than others. Use the following questions to help you create the actions that will form the final part of your career development plan:

1. What individual steps do you need to take to achieve each objective?

2. How will you track your progress of each objective

3. What barriers / obstacles might get in your way?

4. How will you overcome the barriers / obstacles you have identified?

5. How will you celebrate success when you’ve achieved each objective?

It’s important to understand the steps you can take to achieve your certain career goals. For example, a role may require a certain amount of industry experience. So, you can begin researching internships or entry level roles you can do to begin building your way to your career goal. Or, a role may require a certain level of education or skillset to perform the job. You can begin researching bachelors, online programs, specific courses and trainings for certifications to be more eligible for the role.

It is important to remember, coming out of High School and earning a high paying job in the big city will be hard. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t impossible! In fact it is very possible and has been done. You just need to understand what your goals are, where are you now in the process and what are you going to do to get there.

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Networking is very important. Regardless, of how uncomfortable or transactional it may seem - it really isn’t. People are always wanting to help you. So leverage and expand your network! You can start expanding your network by:

1. Attend events near you related to your industry or peers in similar or have been in similar situations as you.

2. Find professionals in the industry you would like to work in. Linked-In will be your best friend - you can “cold-call” professionals or reach out to people in your existing networks and groups. You can search “Linked-In Networking Best Practices” for guidance.