Step 2 - Honesty

This is the third post of a five part series on why career planning is important and how to go about doing it. The five sections are as follows

1. Introduction
2. Evaluating the competencies needed to perform successfully in the position you seek
3. Evaluating your competencies and performing a gap analysis
4. Developing a learning plan
5. Setting your goals and putting your plan into action.

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EVALUATING YOUR COMPETENCIES AND PERFORMING A GAP ANALYSIS

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of 100 battles"
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The best quotes are those whose applicability goes far beyond the subject of discussion. This is one of those quotes. The first step  I presented was about knowing your enemy, or target career in our case. Now you must know your self and you must be brutally honest. This can be difficult and often requires feedback from others that can be hard to swallow. I would recommend reading the book "Career Distinctions" by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixon http://www.careerdistinction.com and taking advantage of their web based anonymous 360 feedback. This allows you to ask questions of people who know you and get honest anonymous feedback from them. The feedback is tallied to let you know what others see as your best attributes.

A couple things to avoid, depending on your personality, are being too negative and being too positive. Some of us tend to tip the scales a little too much in our own favor and others tend to be overly pessimistic. The key here is to be honest and objective, because once you know what your career aspirations are, what it takes to get there and perform the job successfully, and what you have to offer to the position, you can start building your plan.

This step should be one step you find the most value in, because even if you go no further you will have a clear understanding of who your are and what you have to offer regardless of the endeavor you undertake.

For those of you continuing on down the path of career planning  now is the time for a gap analysis. Basically, you need to take what you know about the competencies you need and subtract the competencies you have already obtained. What is left over are the competencies you need to build on, and that will be the next step in Career Planning. Developing a Learning Plan.