Career planning
Planning your career is something you can start no matter where you are in your programme of study. To make this ongoing process more manageable, this section will introduce you to a range of tools and practical support, no matter if you’re considering further study or moving into industry.
Learn about the right way to research different opportunities and the mapping tool called Plan:Me in the short video opposite. You can also explore the career journey planners to get inspiration and ideas of what you could be doing in your year of study.
Planning your career
There is no one right way to choose your career and when you’re busy at university, you find career planning is something you can’t do continuously.
To help you begin and keep track of where you are with your career planning, it is useful to create a map or timeline. This will be your Plan: Me. It's like a research project, where you have a hypothesis that you might enjoy a job/programme of study and then you formulate a series of actions to help you build information about each option until you know enough to get a result. The video above explains this more fully and the rest of the Plan your career section expands on these elements. Here are some steps to get you started.
- Write your plan down to make it real
- Use the ideas from the self-reflection webpages to get you started
- Start with any ideas you have about what you’d like to do
- Base your actions on questions you have about each idea
- Add check-in points into your plan so you keep the momentum going
Career planning
- Make a place to keep everything
- How will you know what you want?
- What are your current ideas?
- How will you research your ideas
- Map it out
- Keep up the momentum
Create a place to store your career related information. It can be a physical paper notebook, a word document or an online tool such as OneNote or Padlet. Writing things down makes your plan real and it allows you to keep track of your progress.
Understanding what you enjoy and what you are good at is a key element to career planning. In our self-reflection section we’ve created some practical ways to help you begin this process.
Think about what jobs/roles/study options you are considering. Write these down. It’s okay to have a question mark in this list if you’re not sure.
See What can I do with my degree and What do Imperial students do for some useful starting points.
Consider what you could do to learn more about these options. What do you need to know to help you make a decision about each one?
Think about resources you may already have (networks, academics, the careers service) and those that you learn more about easily (using online research or the rest of this planning your career section). Again note these down, making them as specific as possible.
See exploring options and LinkedIn for some useful starting points.
Start to form a timeline. This will be different depending on what level of study you are in and when you want/need to start to make your career decisions. The career journey planners maybe useful here.
Add regular meetings with yourself into your diary to stay on track. It can be a simple 15mins every month to revisit your Plan:Me and review what you’ve done, what you’re going to do and when will be best to do it.