Career Planning

I've always thought it worthwhile thinking about and planning what type of career you want in the future. Yet I didn't plan to end up doing what I do now. And I couldn't tell you exactly what I want to be doing in 10 years time. Best laid plans and all.

So maybe I've been thinking about things all wrong. Maybe that interview question about where you see yourself in 1, 2 or 5 years time is a bit unfair. Jeremy Dean certainly thinks so:

"Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to 'get ahead'."

It's an interesting post and worth a read. I found his blog today via the CHO and it looks good. One to flag up to my psychometric-expert colleague Olivia too.