When it comes to career planning and there is no longer a school counselor sitting by your side, what do you do? Please don't dive straight onto monster and start searching for jobs that might seem interesting right now or copy other people's career foot prints just becuase it worked for them. What is it you want to do? Before answering that, who are you?

Career planning is a process in which you identify milestones suitable for that time. These milestones often change as time goes on. This doesn't mean you were "wrong" in the first place, it just means you have gotten to know yourself better to make more suitable choices.

It is often suggested to have a one year plan, three year plan, and a five year plan. I say throw in a ten year plan if you really know what you want already, but be prepared for reality to waver a bit from that ten year milestone. Naturally, the one year plan should be the most realistic, maybe you are already working on reaching the goal for end of year one. Make sure to throw in some challenges and appropriate metrics in the 3 and 5 year plans, such as obtaining an MBA, receiving a promotion after a career change, adding another 15 heads to your staff, transforming a local company into internationally known, etc. The 10 year plan can be an ideal. You should still plan out the logical steps to get to where you want in 10 years even though it will most likely change, it is better to know what you want to happen than not. A life with goals will definitely help you live more fulfillingly and responsibly.

We use maps to help us get to destinations (I use the google maps app on my blackberry in the car all the time...), same concept can be applied for career planning. Think, a Career map. A visual representation of ideas and goals will help us understand better how and what we are trying to achieve. This career map, just like any other map, has a starting point, multiple destination points, and multiple ways of getting there. Similar to an Entity Relationship Diagram from data modeling, each "entity" is a milestone and each “attribute” is what it takes to get to that milestone (attributes describe entities).

Let's create a Career Map!

This is an Entity (solid rectangle):

This is what a career map may look like (click to zoom):