4 Free Career Plan Templates to Help You Review Your Goals

A career plan is a valuable tool for any professional to establish a clear, actionable plan for their future. Here are some templates to create one.

Having a career plan helps you make sense of your future and reach your goals by leveraging your skills and expertise. It also enables you to keep track of your progress.

There are different ways to plan a career. You can write down your career goals in your diary, draw a vision board or use a career plan template you can easily edit. This article covers four career planning templates that you can use to break down your aims into a step-by-step career plan.

The comprehensive career plan template from postgraduate environments outlines six steps that take you from defining your goals to formulating a plan to reach your career goals. As you work your way through each step, here are the things you need to do:

1. Planning always starts with examining what’s inside you. And that’s what this template does in the first step. It calls for you to list down the strengths, skills, and expertise you’ve acquired, how your interests have been formed, and what values you hold dear.
2. To get a clear picture of what career options you may have, step two asks you to explore and filter jobs based on the attributes you defined in step one.
3. Next, you should outline the skills and expertise you need to pursue a specific career option and determine how you will develop them.
4. In the next step, you will consult with your mentor about one career option and define short and long-term goals that will enable you to achieve it.
5. Five steps later, you can create an action plan for achieving those goals by defining what you need to do and setting tight deadlines for each.
6. In the final step, you evaluate how well you’re following your action plan and analyze your overall progress.

Note: To edit templates in PDF format, we recommend using the Sejda PDF editor.

This template consists of four steps, including different questions for you to answer. Your career plan will be ready just by answering those questions. Here are the steps involved:

1. In the first step, you explore the skills you already possess in your current job, the type of work you enjoy doing, what roles you enjoy working on, and define your strengths, values, and list of things that appeal to you.
2. As you move forward, you anticipate your career aspirations. You can narrow down your dream job, project your future career, and define the work environment you enjoy.
3. The next step is to carve out the path to achieve what you have anticipated in the second step. The questions in this section can be viewed as a road map for your direction by weighing in your resources, skills, and knowledge needed to acquire, make commitments, and handle the obstacles you’ll face.
4. The last section deals with gathering resources and building relationships with those who can help you achieve your goals. This includes your family patting you on your back, the head manager who can help you get a promotion, and any new connections you make yourself or through community involvement that will help you succeed.

There is also a dedicated action plan section where you can break down your long-term goals into smaller chunks and work on each individually by developing skills, gathering resources, and setting deadlines.

Are you having trouble meeting targets in your current job? Check out our article for tips on setting career-boosting goals.

You can also plan your career in four simple steps using this template. Here is what each step holds for you:

1. The first step is more like a self-assessment test where you reflect on four essential elements of your present career: interests, values, core skills, and competencies. Filling out each of them will give you a clear picture of what’s within you that you are leveraging in your current job.
2. The next step is to outline your goals for one year, 2-3 years, and 3-5 years. To make your struggles more practical, you can divide your main goals into different years. It also includes a section to define three objectives that you think are most crucial for reaching your aspirations.
3. As you move on to the action planning phase, you can decide different areas of development for your goals, break them down into specific activities, decide timeframes, map out how to achieve them, and develop strategies to overcome barriers.
4. Lastly, the last section is for you to review your progress, which has been duplicated three times to allow you to examine your progress three times. For each area of development you have defined in the third step, you can review the progress, and if not completed, you can determine how to complete it by the next review.

You can use this template to outline your career goals in five sections. Each section includes the following information:

1. Like other templates, the first step in this template is to determine your strengths, what you are passionate about and good at, and what kind of environment you wish to work in. Additionally, you can narrow down your industries of interest with a comprehensive list.
2. Afterward, the template allows you to reflect on three different career roles, identify what prerequisites you need to work on, and list action steps you need to take to get there. You can exchange ideas with your career coach, family members, friends, or anyone else using the brainstorming section. Then, take their feedback into account and realign your goals accordingly.
3. Then, you can now weigh in all three options you’ve brainstormed so far and compare them by identifying the pros and cons of each. Once you have laid out your thoughts, you need to choose one before proceeding.
4. In the next section, you can specify your long-term and short-term goals, the start and end dates, and the steps you need to take to achieve them.
5. The next step is to work on your goals, and while you do so, you can use the last section of the template to set up dates for reviews to keep track of your progress.

It can be challenging to set smart goals at times. Check out our article to set SMART goals for your career and personal development if you are struggling with this.

Plan Your Career With Smooth Templates

These templates will come in handy when crafting an effective career plan. After planning, put your best effort into following your plan and hold yourself accountable when you veer off course. If you find it overwhelming to pick one career, you can get help from different career advice websites that can assist you.

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