See if you can remember a time in your childhood when you noticed somebody doing professional work. Maybe a nurse or doctor, dressed in a lab coat, was listening to your heartbeat. Maybe a worker at a construction site, decked in a hard hat, was operating noisy machinery. Maybe a cashier at the checkout line in a grocery store was busily scanning barcodes. Each day in your life you could have seen a hundred people doing various jobs. Surely some of the jobs drew your interest and appealed to your imagination.

What Is Career Development?

What exactly is career development? It’s a lifelong process in which we become aware of, interested in, knowledgeable about, and skilled in a career. It’s a key part of human growth as our identity forms and our life unfolds.

There are five main stages of career development. Each stage correlates with attitudes, behaviors, and relationships that we all tend to have at that point and age. As we progress through each stage and reach the corresponding milestones, we prepare to move on to the next one.

Five Stages of Career Development

Which stage of career development do you feel you are in currently?

1: Growing

During the “growing” stage, you begin to have a sense about the future. You begin to realize that your participation in the world is related to being able to do certain tasks and accomplish certain goals.

2: Exploring

In the “exploring” stage, you find that you have specific interests and aptitudes. You are aware of your inclinations to perform and learn about some subjects more than others. You may try out jobs in your community or at your school. You may begin to explore a specific career. At this stage, you have some detailed data points about careers, which will guide you in certain directions.

3: Establishing

By now, in the “establishing” stage, you are selecting or entering a field you consider suitable and you are exploring job opportunities that will be stable. You are also looking for upward growth, so you may be thinking about an advanced degree.

4: Maintaining

In the “maintaining” stage, you may be in an upward pattern of learning new stills and staying engaged. But you might also be merely coasting and cruising or even feeling stagnant. You may be taking stock of what you’ve accomplished and where you still want to go.

5: Reinventing

In the “reinventing” stage, you might be transitioning into retirement. But retirement in our technologically advanced world can be just the beginning of a new career or pursuit—a time when you can reinvent yourself. There are many new interests to pursue, including teaching others what you’ve learned, volunteering, starting online businesses, consulting, etc. Reinventing might also happen if you choose to switch careers, which is a common switch.

Keep in mind that your career-development path is personal to you, and you may not fit neatly into the categories described above. Perhaps you have had many establishing stages and have then moved on to reinventing. Perhaps you are a freelancer and work in many different areas at once, continuing to explore your opportunities for a time. Perhaps your socioeconomic background changes how you fit into the schema. Perhaps your physical and mental abilities affect how you define the idea of a “career.” And for everyone, too, there are factors of chance that can’t be predicted or anticipated. You are unique, and your career path can only be developed by you.

Career Development Resources

Career experts say that people will change careers (not to mention jobs) five to seven times in a lifetime. So your career will likely not be a straight and narrow path. Be sure to set goals and assess your interests, skills, and values often. Seek opportunities for career growth and enrichment. And take advantage of the rich set of resources available to you.

Career Development Office on Campus

Whether you are a student, a graduate, or even an employer, you can obtain invaluable career development assistance at your college or university. Campus career centers can support, guide, and empower you in every step of the career development process, from initial planning to achieving lifelong career satisfaction.

Books on Career Development

Going to college is one of the best steps you can take to prepare for a career. But soon-to-be or recently graduated students are not necessarily guaranteed jobs. Staying educated about strategies for developing your career and finding new jobs will help you manage ongoing transitions. The book The Secret to Getting a Job After College: Marketing Tactics to Turn Degrees into Dollars by Larry Chiagouris was written specifically to help recent grads increase their chances of finding a job right after college. This book speaks to students in all majors and provides tips and tactics to attract the attention of an employer and successfully compete with other candidates to get the job you want.

The following video provides an introduction to the book.

You can view the transcript for “The Secret to Getting a Job After College” here (opens in new window).

Career Roadmap

You can use the Career Roadmap, from DePaul University, to evaluate where you are and where you want to be in your career/careers. This roadmap can help you decide if you want to change career paths and can guide you in searching for a new job. The road map identifies the following four cyclical steps:

1. Know yourself.
2. Explore and choose options.
3. Gain knowledge and experience.
4. Put it all together: the job search process.

Carry Out Changes with Plan, Do, Check, Act

Figure 1. PDCA

PDCA (plan, do, check, act), shown in Figure 1 above, is a four-step strategy for carrying out change. You can use this strategy to evaluate where you are in the career-development process and to identify your next steps. The strategy is typically used in the business arena as a framework for improving processes and services. But you can think of your career as a personal product you are offering or selling.

1. PLAN: What are your goals and objectives? What process will you use to get to your targets? You might want to plan smaller to begin with and test out possible effects. For instance, if you are thinking of getting into a certain career, you might plan to try it out first as an intern or a volunteer on a part-time basis. When you start on a small scale, you can test possible outcomes.
2. DO: Implement your plan. Sell your product—which is YOU and your skills, talents, energy, and enthusiasm. Collect data as you go along; you will need it for charting and analyzing in the Check and Act steps ahead.
3. CHECK: Look at your results so far. Are you happy with your job or wherever you are in the career-development process? How is your actual accomplishment measuring up next to your intentions and wishes? Look for where you may have deviated in your intended steps. For example, did you take a job in another city when your initial plans were for working closer to friends and family? What are the pros and cons? If you like, create a chart that shows you all the factors. With a chart, it will be easier to see trends over several PDCA cycles.
4. ACT: How should you act going forward? What changes in planning, doing, and checking do you want to take? The PDCA framework is an ongoing process. Keep planning, doing, checking, and acting. The goal is continuous improvement.

Internet Sites for Career Planning

Visit the Internet Sites for Career Planning page at the National Career Development Association’s website. You will find extensive, definitive, and frequently updated information on a wealth of topics there.