Do you know what you want to be doing in five years’ time? You should. A carefully crafted career plan can show you the way forward, especially if your job is stuck in the doldrums and you lack inspiration to change it. The most successful plans are based on honest self-analysis: take time out to appraise your ambitions, experience and skills, and then draft a dynamic new CV.

Career plans

1. Have a career plan – however simple – if only to judge whether you are on target. Most of us have some kind of a plan, even if it’s only in our heads. Try committing yours to paper to see what it looks like.
2. Goals don’t need to be job-specific – fine if your ambition is to “be an astronaut” but not everyone is so definite. Don’t be put off expressing less explicit goals, such as ‘quality: of life and work experience’, or ‘variety: a wide portfolio of managerial skills and experience’.
3. Review your career plan regularly and set yourself fresh objectives: pin point contacts, competencies and knowledge you need to acquire, and roles to investigate further.
4. Make your plan realistic and effective:
   • Indulge in introspective and retrospection to unearth your values, explore what ‘makes you tick’, the skills you have honed, the places and people you like to work with. All this will be useful material when writing your CV later.
   • Anticipate what will be happening two to five years from now – to your profession, your organisation, your home circumstances and the world around you. Changes in these areas can help fulfill your ambitions, or inhibit them.
   • Strike a healthy life-work balance – position your plan in the context of your life and wider ambitions: each can play off the other and help or hinder you.
5. Keep a generic CV up and running on your computer. Update it regularly and overhaul it every two or three jobs, it should show your growing competencies and echo your career plan. Use it to build networks and be ready for relevant jobs when they come up.
6. Think twice before posting off your application. If done well the selection process will take up a lot of your time and energy. Does this position further your ambition, even by an indirect route?
7. Find out if you’re suited to the role by gathering plenty of intelligence on your prospective employer (including the organisation, department and team). Use your networks, as well as the employers adverts, job specs, websites and publicity material. What do they really want? What are they really like? Check if the job suits your career plan – and say so in your application.
8. Exploit (and time) your call to ‘discuss the post further’. Show you are well informed, ask pre-prepared questions to gain more insight, and market yourself by putting across a strong personal profile.
9. Make it easy for the short-listing panel to select you: tailor your CV to their requirements. Using the job description and person specification:
   • shape and structure the content. Move your most significant achievements to the front of each section. Be ruthless: edit out all irrelevant information.
   • Top your CV with a dynamic personal profile (a four or five line summary about you, your areas of expertise and career direction) and make it pertinent to the position.
10. Persuade some critical friends or colleagues to appraise your CV. Remembering the likely competition or the job, put yourself in the employers shoes – what kind of CV would impress you?

CV style file

• Choose and appropriate format: show your career progression by adopting a traditional chronological style, or highlight your transferable skills by using a skills-based format (list, with examples, your key skills aligning them to the employer’s requirements: then briefly add your career summary).
• Take care with layout, spacing and headings – be consistent.
• Pitch the wording at the readership and ban jargon, especially technical terms and abbreviations which may not be understood.
• Quantify your achievement showing the results – size of budgets, number of staff, etc.
• Be succinct.
• Read your finished CV aloud to see if it makes sense.
• Finally, triple check grammar and spellings – don’t rely on spell-checks, and take special care with names.

Originally published in the Health Management Journal in 2002.