Career Planning

Abstract

Traditionally, students completing either high school or college undertake an arduous process, called career planning, which charts a probable and doable plan (usually projected over two or five years) as a way to direct their futures. Career planning involves a careful examination of career possibilities and then testing whether the skills and the opportunities suggested by that career path match the student’s own life expectations. Education and experience competencies are important components. With technology and large adjustments in the national economy making the job market less stable, career planning has become more of a lifelong process of periodic reassessment.

Overview

In the post-World War II era—that is, for the generation known collectively as the baby boomers, career planning was a synonym for stability and organization and, most importantly, maturity. Certainly, a child could dream of being an astronaut or a cowboy, but a mark of growing up, of assuming the responsibilities of adulthood, directly involved using clear and clean logic in deciding on an appropriate career. A student—maybe in high school but definitely in college—assessed their interests and their education skills selected a career pathway. Family expectations were often key, and for many young people the decision was almost inevitable. In that era, career planning was not associated with long-term blue collar employment. Because women were not a significant element of the workforce (23%), their career plan was far more restricted in its expectations and its implementation. For minority men, the careers paths were considerably restricted. In fact, career planning was thought of as the assumed privilege of educated white males.

Career planning generally assumed the worker would join a network, accommodate and contribute to the operations, advance within the network to an appropriate echelon of responsibility (and salary), and then retire. The goal of career planning was to make a single “right” decision, followed by forty years of doing exactly what the person had planned to do. Disruptions to that plan, dramatic changes, came either because the decision itself was flawed—that is, the person did not honestly assess their interests and competencies, or the business was flawed, resulting in layoffs, terminations, and confusion in the workplace that militated against company growth. Somewhere in the career planning stage a mistake had been made, and the person was then responsible for ad libbing a new direction.

A sudden change in career might be accompanied by the perception that something was amiss. After all, if the next-door neighbor had been a banker for ten years and turned up teaching elementary school arithmetic, something was vaguely wrong. Change was considered chaos, deviations indicated a problem. A career sales clerk in an established department store, for example, might desire to go back to school in pursuit of a different profession, but strong disincentives existed, including tectonic changes in the family dynamic, financial instability, and suspicion arising from the clerk’s apparent unreliability in deviating from an established career path. A career plan was just that: a plan, a reliable sort of GPS map that provided the work itself with a system of both value and purpose.

The job culture underwent a dramatic reconfiguration as technology began to impact the global job market in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, career planning steadfastly maintained its emphasis on making the “right” decision to pursue the “right” job. If anything, career planning became more structured into the secondary level and even in middle school—guidance counselors became de facto career counselors. Standardized testing was used to determine “real” aptitudes—that is, career, or aptitude, testing might indicate a student should be an airline pilot. Such testing did not necessarily take into account a student’s interests (bias) but instead sought to measure skills and abilities that indicated likely success in a particular field.

Of course, the pressure was still on relatively young people to make decisions that would impact and shape their lives. Women and minorities still navigated through career plans with far more limited options, and people still experienced frustration and boredom by their mid-thirties, after choosing a career that turned out not to be the “right” decision after all.

Millennials broke entirely with the traditional conventional sense of career planning (Meister, 2012). Career planning itself came to be perceived as a strangely ironic commitment in a volatile employment environment. People themselves change—who they are when they graduate from college is hardly who they are in their forties. Businesses change—networks adapt, grow, stagnate, expand, contract. Business models differ each from the other, some offering better benefits, better technology support, better supervision, better work environment. The world changes—economic fluctuations impact every field, computer technology advances can radically change a field in a single business cycle, political movements and social trends alter conditions in work environments and the perceptions associated with a career.

Significantly, workers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were living longer and healthier lives. Many workers nearing the traditional retirement age of sixty-five could not afford to stop working. Others had no inclination to retire. For these, retirement called for an opportunity for an entirely new plan (Schulaka, 2016). The longer the commitment to working, the more change needed to be inculcated into the formula.

Complicating the picture, family structure was changing—multiple incomes, multiple marriages, multiple generations living together became normal. By 2015, employment data indicated that millennials would change careers—that is, pursue entirely different occupations—on average four times before the age of thirty. That statistic demanded a new paradigm to define the traditional concept of career planning.

Applications

Career planning since the turn of the new millennium emphasizes agility and responsiveness to opportunity as it arises (Brown, 2014). The key concept for career planning became flexibility. Students as early as middle school are now introduced to the concept of work, of seeing their own education as a preparation for some level of income security. They learn about abstract concepts such as credit, income, value, price—the critical element to career planning is for an adolescent to understand the realities of money, where it comes from, how it is used, and the responsibilities that come with it. Career planning is grounded in the fundamental reality that no one aspires to being underemployed or, worse, unemployed.

High schools and colleges offer career services—that is, departments of trained job counselors and career developers. The key to career planning in the twenty-first century is to not only inventory personal skills and interests but also do appropriate levels of research. The burgeoning career services field along with the vast resources of the internet, including websites devoted to individual careers and to the paradigms of career planning, put a volume of information at the fingertips of millennials. A technologically savvy generation can do a copious amount of research efficiently and effectively, and social networking platforms for professionals such as LinkedIn enable job seekers and holders to form connections and trade information (Melnick, 2016). Veterans in particular fields can share information about skills, expectations, and compensation, companies can post openings, and recruiters can trawl for good candidates.

Future workers begin as early as tenth grade to assess their own skills and interests. With the assistance of guidance counselors, parents, and teachers a student is expected to explore the essential elements of those interests and how they might translate into career plans. Technical colleges, industries, and the military branches all send recruiters to visit high schools, who ask students to envision how their strengths and interests might be developed in the fields they represent.

After assessing individual interests and researching carefully information about a wide variety of career opportunities, the person must then act—decisions have to be made, critical steps have to be taken. Ideally with the assistance of family and friends, the person now directs attention to the actual education requirements—for example, some occupations require at least a two- or four-year degree and most require some level of training. Universities provide a list of preparatory education requirements and minimum competencies in high school course work hopeful candidates must bring to the admissions process, and some careers are open only to those with advanced degrees and in-field training. Even fields that do not require graduate or post-graduate level educations often involve certification or licensure demonstrating assessed competency or an appropriate level of training to ensure a mastery of knowledge and skills.

Because career plans are built now to accommodate flexibility, college students understand the provincial nature of this career pathway—that an intention to study psychology may alter in the sophomore year to a pursuit of a business degree. Change is no longer perceived as a crisis but rather as an element of what is necessarily a dynamic and recursive process. Additionally, unlike in previous generations, people in the workforce of the early twenty-first century expect to change jobs or careers (and even embrace the idea) to maintain workplace satisfaction and opportunities for advancement ("Why employees," 2015). With greater levels of education and knowledge of technology, newer generations of workers are proving more innovative and more focused on their own professional goals than on particular organizations, resulting in less structured career paths (Gong, Ramkissoon, Greenwood, & Hoyte, 2018).

Indeed, a person approaching the threshold of the job market can actually maintain multiple career plans, a sort of Plan A, Plan B, and a fallback should everything not work out. For example, Plan A: be a bank executive, actually in charge of directing financial operations of a major bank. Plan B: teach business management in a robust and vibrant educational environment such as a trade school or a graduate program. Plan C: pursue a start-up company in real estate. If, in pursuing A, the person realizes they are not willing to make the enormous commitment in hours and personal priorities needed for a successful career in banking, there is no reason to panic. Other more suitable options remain in their career quiver.

Career planning is now perceived to be applicable to four entirely different demographics: (1) those still in school and operating within a comfortable time frame; (2) those who are approaching the close of their academic careers, either secondary school, professional certification programs, or traditional post-secondary education, including master’s and doctoral levels; (3) professionals in their twenties and thirties who have added critical job skills and job training to their resume and now are looking for careers that would represent new challenges and new professional opportunities in the same or a related field; and (4) professionals who decide, either by choice or because of company/network circumstances, to move into a field largely unrelated to their current employment and hence representing additional challenges, potentially including returning to school or some other form of training.

Career planning has evolved into a wide-open process, ongoing until a person is ready to retire from the work environment entirely. Career options may arise throughout a person’s work life and be driven by goals and circumstances outside of strictly occupational considerations. For example, the desire to live in a particular geographic area may preclude employment in certain industries, or the willingness to work in a particular industry or at a particular company may be the ticket to living in a desired location. Couples may find it necessary to negotiate relocation to accommodate one partner’s employment, or the ability to raise a family in a preferred lifestyle may depend on the coming together of income, location, and work demands (Vick & Furlong, 2015). A state of semi-retirement or remote employment can allow workers approaching retirement to dial back work hours and downsize or relocate.

As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals are graduating from college on average with approximately $35,000 in education loans. Workers that carry large debt may postpone the traditional benchmarks of maturity: marriage, a family, a mortgage. Poor planning can limit or destroy career opportunities, and even good planning can be disrupted by changes in the job market, especially those caused by economic downturns that depress employment opportunities. Some career counselors, however, advise that anxiety, a natural response to job uncertainty, is the “foundation” for change and adaptation.

Viewpoints

From a traditional standpoint, of course, flexible career planning is an oxymoron. A plan cannot be flexible and still pretend to be a plan. By opening up career planning to change, the argument goes, careless and reckless behavior is only encouraged, even expected and sanctioned. Adolescents stay adolescent, hampered by a Peter Pan syndrome that equates adulthood with stasis and mortality. Career zigzagging raises flags about a person’s risk tolerance and ability to make commitments and presages the inevitable cliché midlife crisis.

Clearly, workers must draw a line between the legitimate weighing of options and self-destructive, reactive selfishness. Fulfilling careers require a level of commitment and a mature sense of responsibility does not allow for quixotic abandonment of coworkers and employers. Flexible career planning unavoidably affects a person’s family, friends, and coworkers—who should not be expected to accommodate another’s self-generating menu of life decisions—and therefore demands an emphasis on “planning.” It must not be a free fall into drift and spontaneity.

Career planning offers a practical and even realistic model for how a person actually grows—movement, although not entirely controllable, is manageable and directable. As in a video game in which failure, restarting, and advancing to the next level is all part of the process, career planning can be viewed as a series of strategic opportunities and challenges offering a “dopamine rush” as a reward for each success (Ansted, 2016). Career planning, in fact, has ceased to be an adolescent activity laid down on taking up a career and rather become an ongoing part of workers’ employment. Every day, work and responsibilities, projects and duties act as career planning assessments. A person assumes responsibility for understanding the nature of the job and the realities of the career field, thus avoiding simplifying a career into a prison.

Terms & Concepts

Aptitude: A skill or competency with specific and practical application.

Blue Collar: A term used to describe those sectors of the economy in which most workers are not required to have a college education.

Guidance Counselor: A secondary school position that oversees the behavioral problems of students and offers a range of limited advice for helping students, including career and college counseling.

Midlife Crisis: A psychological premise in which a person approaches an age, usually in their forties, at which they begin to question the value and worth of the life they have been leading and indulge in behaviors intended to stave off a sense of approaching old age or having arrived at a dead end; sometimes this results in the person taking their life in a dramatic new direction, for example, leaving a marriage or abandoning a long-held position in a company.

Peter Pan Syndrome: A psychological condition in which a person dreads assuming the responsibilities of adulthood and seeks to extend the benefits of adolescence for as long as possible.

Paradigm: A model constructed to define a condition, subject to revision.

Bibliography

Ansted, R. (2016). The gold star effect: The gamification of career decision-making. Career Planning & Adult Development Journal, 32(3), 51–57.

Apodala, M. (2016). Promoting client change: The role anxiety plays in career decision making. Career Planning & Adult Development Journal, 32(1), 10–18.

Brown, P. (8 Mar 2014). Why career plans are dangerous to your career--and what you should do instead. Forbes.

Gong, B., Ramkissoon, A., Greenwood, R. A., & Hoyte, D. S. (2018). The generation for change: Millennials, their career orientation, and role innovation. Journal of Managerial Issues, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved October 17, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=128481755&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Grant, R., Ratliff-Miller, P., & De La Rosa, D. (2016). Career goal planning system (Career GPS): A model of a school of accounting's success in student development. Business Education Innovation Journal, 8(1), 100–105. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=117612847&site=ehost-live

Jung, Y., & Takeuchi, N. (2016). Gender differences in career planning and success. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 31(2), 603–623. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=113593517&site=ehost-live

Meister, J. (14 Aug 2012). Job hopping in the “new normal” for millennials: Three ways to prevent human resource nightmare. Forbes.

Melnick, J. (2016). Today’s job search: What’s changed? What hasn’t? Career Planning & Adult Development Journal, 32(3), 8–14.

Schulaka, C. (2016). Are You Ready? Journal of Financial Planning, 29(12), 8. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=120017856&site=ehost-live

Vick, J., & Furlong, J. (2015). Knowing when to say when. Chronicle of Higher Education, 62(17), 12–13.

When it’s time to discuss your career path. (2016) Administrative Professionals Today, 42(10), 5. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=117839501&site=ehost-live

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Suggested Reading

Bolles, R. (2015). What color is your parachute? Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: Crown/Ten Speed Press.

Clark, D. (2016). Planning your post-retirement career. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=118686099&site=ehost-live

Gonzalez, A. (2017). Career planning for high-school students: The career management essentials. Bloomington, IN: Westbow Press.

Hertzman, J. L., Moreo, A. P., & Wiener, P. J. (2015). Career planning strategies and skills of hospitality management students. Journal of Human Resources in Hospitality & Tourism, 14(4), 423–443. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=102704483&site=ehost-live

Lore, N. (2012). The path finder: How to choose or change your career for a lifetime of satisfaction and success. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone

Mikačić, M. T. (2015). The effects of career planning education. RUO: Revija Za Univerzalno Odlicnost, 4(3), 92–109. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=110870230&site=ehost-live

Molisani, J. (2014). Be the captain of your career: A new approach to career planning and advancement. Pasadena, CA: Precision Wordage.

Muchnick, J. (2016). Teen’s guide to college & career planning. Lincoln, NB: Peterson’s.