Career Planning

Career Development Framework

Grow throughout life by learning and reflecting on yourself, your background, and your strengths.

  • Make use of offers of help & support and listen to feedback.

  • Recognise what skills you need to develop to progress your career.

  • Reflect upon what you have learned from every experience.

  • Challenge yourself and try new things.

Explore the full range of possibilities open to you and learn about recruitment processes and the culture of different workplaces.

Manage your career actively, make the most of opportunities and learn from setbacks.

  • Be confident and optimistic.

  • Plan, prioritise, and set targets.

  • Manage opportunities, changes, and transistions.

  • Be resilient and learn from setbacks.

Create opportunities by being proactive and building positive relationships with others.

  • Build and maintain relationships.

  • Be creative and agile.

  • Act as a leader or role model to others.

  • Be proactive.

Balance your life as a worker with your wellbeing, other interests, and your involvement with your family and community.

  • Pay attention to your physical and mental wellbeing.

  • Keep on top of personal finances.

  • Be sure to pay enough attention to your loved ones.

  • Find healthy ways to release stress and relax your mind.

See the big picture by paying attention to how the economy, politics, and society connect with your own life and career.

  • Read different media and viewpoints.

  • Explore local and national trends.

  • Stay on top of trends in science and technology.

  • Explore the links between careers and the environment, society, politics and the economy.

What is career planning?

You might wonder who on earth plans a career? If anyone, surely it's adults already in work, looking for a promotion or a new job?

Career planning should start much, much earlier than that - even if you don't realise that's what you are doing. To begin with, you may just have an interest in something - a sport, a hobby, certain types of books or films. Perhaps this interest develops into you thinking it might be fun to have a job in that area one day

Taking steps

Following on from that thought, you can start to plan a career. It doesn't matter at all if you change your idea as you move on - most people do. The first steps you need to make are finding out more about yourself. You're probably already drawn to the type of work that matches at least some of your natural characteristics - extroverts don't often want to be librarians, for example. The more you discover about yourself, the more you'll understand what sort of work you'll shine in.

Your Year 8 careers day starts this by introducing your to psychological profiling - which is just a fancy phrase for finding out your likes and dislikes.

In Year 9, you make your GCSE option choices. Although you are not able to drop any core subjects (English, maths, and science) you are able to start specialising in subjects that interest you most. So, if you want to work in a design or art field one day, GCSE Art is a sensible choice. This is the stage to apply the things you have learned about your skills onto the field of all the careers available.

By Year 10, you will be settled into your GCSE courses, and will start to experience some of the opportunities available to you after full time education. We'll introduce you to apprenticeships and universities, and hopefully organise some workplace experiences. These are chances for you to actually try out different ways of learning to understand what will suit you later on. If the career path you think you want involves university, but you really, really don't learn well in a classroom set up, now is the time to rethink the career choice, or see if there is an alternative way to get a degree.

Putting your plan into action

Year 11 is your final year in full time education, and where you put the first part of your career plan into action. During year 11, you need to find and apply for the course, or apprenticeship, that you will do in Years 12 and 13. If you've followed the steps advised here, you'll already know the sort of work you want to do and the best way to get there.

From then on, you should keep adding new steps to your plan. Follow the career development framework above and continually explore new opportunities. Stepping out of your comfort zone to try something new is the very best way to progress in life.