How should I begin planning my career? 

Whether you’re just starting out after completing your bachelor’s degree or you’re a decade into your career and searching for new opportunities, you need a career plan.

Setting clear goals and planning how to reach them gives your career direction. It provides a reference point that helps maintain a sense of progression in your professional life and keeps your motivation high.

When your career lacks direction, it can leave you feeling unfulfilled at work, leading to complacency in your day-to-day tasks, and contributing to struggles with burnout and other similar challenges.

So, when it comes to career planning, where should you start?

How do I start making a career plan?

You can’tmake a career plan without first looking inward—considering who you are and what’s important to you.

A fulfilling career plan should reflect your key motivations and what you want from your professional life. Ideally, it should be based on your skills and personality traits, harnessing what you are good at and areas where you can grow. And it should take into account your past experiences—even if they are not directly related to the direction you intend to move toward.

These factors form the core pillars of your professional life and can help you begin to identify career paths that are a good fit.

Take this example:

When starting to piece together their career plan, a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in math feels that finance is an industry well-suited to their quantitative skill set. They also realize they value work-life balance and prefer being involved in long-term work over short-term projects. This helps them refine their focus, opting to pursue a path in asset management rather than investment banking.

Or this:

Approaching 10 years in their career, a software engineer wants to move beyond technical solutions and increase their impact on the wider business. Already equipped with a technical skill set, they have enjoyed previous opportunities to collaborate with people in other teams, which leads them to consider roles that foster more cross-functional collaboration. Finally, they recognize that leveraging their prior technology experience would help them transition from a senior engineering track into product management.

In both examples, evaluating motivations, skills, and experience helps clarify a realistic career direction.  

What should I do next after working out my career goals?

With your goals identified, your next step is to begin mapping the route that will get you there. This is unlikely to be a linear path—few careers play out this way—and it will require a variety of different approaches.

Career progression usually requires a blend of upskilling, gaining qualifications, building relevant experience, and expanding your network. The amount you rely on each will depend on your individual circumstances.

Gaining experience is almost always crucial in achieving long-term career goals. If you’re interested in pursuing a technical pathway, it may take several years of developing your knowledge and skills before you can become a specialist in your field. Those interested in ascending into management or leadership positions will still have to build experience as an individual contributor before moving into more strategic roles.

Around half of workers land their roles through a connection in their network, according to a 2025 survey. As well as providing access to new opportunities, connecting with other professionals in your field can help you further build your understanding of the marketplace — learning more about your value in the job market and the contribution you could bring to organizations, as well as insights you can incorporate into your own work.

And don’t overlook the importance of lifelong learning. If your plan involves changing industry or function, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to need to fill some gaps in your knowledge or skills. Going back to school can also provide access to new networks and help you build connections and gain access to expertise in your desired area.

Even if your plan doesn’t involve a career pivot, lifelong learning is still key for future-proofing. This is particularly true when considering how changes in technology and advances in artificial intelligence are impacting the workplace—the World Economic Forum predicts that 39% of workers’ core skills will change before the end of the decade.

Considering any educational requirements—whether in the form of higher education such as a business master’s degree or something more specialized like a short-course or executive certification—should therefore be an important part of your overall career plan.

What else should I consider when making my career plan?

Remember that career planning is an exercise intended to keep you moving forward. Your career plan doesn’t need to be so prescriptive that you turn down new opportunities simply because they don’t fit exactly with what you had in mind.

It’s also something that should evolve with you. Over time, as you meet different people, achieve successes, and have new experiences, it’s important to come back to your career plan and adapt it as your priorities evolve. Early in your career, you may have imagined yourself eventually becoming a manager, however if you come to realize that your favorite thing about work is applying your skills to technical tasks and honing your specialist knowledge, you probably need to review your long-term goals.

Finally, your career doesn’t take place in a vacuum—your priorities outside of work are also hugely important. You must consider how pursuing your short, mid, and long-term goals will affect those around you. You should think about the impact on your mental and physical wellbeing. Equally important are any financial obligations or other responsibilities that you need to balance alongside your professional life.