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Choosing a career

2025-05-19

Feeling unsure about your career? Whether you're just starting out or considering a change, creating a clear career development plan can help you move forward with confidence. Here's how to do it in four simple steps

A career plan is an evolving strategy to guide your learning and progression throughout your working life. These four stages help you map out clear actions toward your career goals: 

Career planning matters - it helps you avoid impulsive decisions and recognise the right time to look for new career opportunities or develop new skills. 

This model can be used by anyone - from school leavers to students, graduates and career changers. 

1. Identify your skills and interests

Your career choice plays a major role in your long-term happiness and success. You'll spend a significant amount of your life at work and so in order to enjoy your job, remain motivated and fulfil your potential, you need to choose wisely. 

It's important to understand your range of skills and knowledge, so you can see if they're a good fit for the job you'd like to do. Being aware of the skills you have also helps to highlight any gaps that may need to be filled to achieve your career goals. 

List your key skills with real-life examples. An honest self-assessment will help narrow your options in the next step. You can also see where you measure up in terms of the skills employers are looking for. 

Consider where you are now, where you want to be and how you're going to get there. If you're uncertain about your direction, reflect on the following questions: 

If you're struggling to identify your strengths, weaknesses and character traits, try taking practice psychometric tests or doing our Job Match quiz. 

By the end of this step, you'll have identified the sort of jobs that will suit you but won't yet have enough information to make a decision on which to pursue.

2. Explore career ideas

This step involves researching the job market and narrowing down career paths that align with your interests.  

Explore your ideal job sector and stay on top of its trends by researching the local, national and global jobs market. This will help you to discover more potential career paths, and understand which roles are expanding or declining. 

There are three overarching job sectors. These are: 

Browsing job profiles may introduce you to some less obvious career paths where your skills and qualifications could be useful. 

You could also try: 

Compile a shortlist of around five to ten jobs, before considering the advantages and disadvantages of each in terms of: 

Think about whether you'd thrive working in startups, for large companies, or self-employment. 

This is the perfect time to consider work experience and internships, work shadowing and volunteering opportunities. They'll help you to gain an insight into the areas you're interested in before committing yourself to a certain career path. 

3. Make a decision

Combine what you've learned about yourself with what you've discovered about your options and the graduate jobs market. 

Choose your top career option and a couple of strong backups. To help make a decision, ask yourself the following questions: 

If you're struggling to reach a conclusion, try strategies to support your decision-making. Listing the pros and cons of a particular job or career is often useful, as is completing a personal SWOT analysis: 

Remember, you're not alone in making this decision - there's plenty of support out there to guide you. Look to: 

Keep in mind that you'll probably be suited to more than one career and today's jobseekers usually change career direction more than once in their working life. The key to being employable is having the ability to adapt and learn new skills. 

4. Set achievable goals

Your career plan should outline how you'll get to where you want to be, what actions are needed and when, and separated into your short, medium and long-term goals. Constantly review your progress, especially after each short-term goal is reached. 

You must also establish a backup career development plan, in case your situation changes. Map several alternative paths to your long-term goal, considering how you'll overcome the types of problems you might encounter - such as training requirements - at each step. 

Your first short-term goal may involve improving your CV and cover letter. Other short or medium-term targets could include: 

Book time with your university careers team to review your plan and get feedback if you feel you need some professional reassurance. 

Career planning is ongoing. As you grow, keep refining your path - a solid plan helps you navigate new opportunities with clarity. 

How to use AI to guide your career choices

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a useful tool for exploring career options and planning your next steps. With the right prompts, it can suggest roles you might not have considered by analysing your skills, interests, and values.

To try it out in ChatGPT, tailor this instruction to your qualifications and interests:

'I studied biology, enjoy problem solving and working with people, and I'm interested in health and sustainability. What careers might suit me?'

You'll get a list of potential roles, plus explanations of why they might be a good fit. From there, you can explore skills employers want, typical responsibilities, and salaries in your area.

Research platforms like Perplexity also are great for exploring employers, competitors, and industry trends. For example, you could ask:

As always, use AI as a starting point. These tools spark ideas, but your career decisions should reflect your own goals and strengths.