(From the Introduction)

The Career Success Planner looks beyond job titles or descriptions to help you decide what you really want to do with your life and what will make you happy.

"When you know what you are looking for you can create the vehicle (e.g. training, employment, businesses or combination of them) to get you there. "It is about finding a career that fits your life rather than the other way around. Today this means taking responsibility for your own life and career.

There will always be discomfort when you review what you are doing and consider what you may want to do in the future. The only way you can manage this effectively is to understand what it is that really motivates you. Working through this course you will look at your life in relation to careers. It is not until you have understood this that you can really search for what your ideal career may be.

It may be that you are looking for further development within your existing environment or that you want to prepare for a new environment. You can only make informed decisions if you look at where you are right now. This includes looking at all aspects of life so you can make future plans in relation to your career.

Your career is normally the vehicle for achieving other goals in life. Therefore it is like building a bridge. To build your bridge to success it is critical to know where you are now, where you want to be and have a plan of how to get there.

We all have ambitions that we need to achieve in life to make it worthwhile. With this is mind the course is designed to inspire you. It is self-paced and uses practical tips, pictures and graphics, self-assessment activities, as well as accelerated learning

( in the form of key words ) to assist your learning. Although some of this work is challenging it will ultimately be rewarding.

1.0 Career Definition

The use of the word Career has been associated with training while on the job, doing an apprenticeship or often climbing the ladder to more responsibility within an organization. Previously employers provided career training for promotion or you may have had a job until retirement. There has been a career paradigm shift where career development has also become the responsibility of the individual.

A career has been defined as having five distinct meanings:

• Career as advancement
• Career as a profession
• Career as a lifelong sequence of jobs
• Career as a sequence of role-related experiences
• Career as a lifelong sequence of work attitudes and behaviors

Consider a career as any life-long sequence of jobs regardless of whether it is inside or outside a profession

This book enables the reader to consider their current role, next role or prepare for a long term role. As you work on the steps throughout the book the course will help you:

Enhance your own career self-awareness.

Increase your knowledge of career possibilities.

Develop skills to give you greater control over your changing work environment.

Make rational choices to reach your career goals.

(Please note that this book can be downloaded and printed).

Today, due to the speed of change and globalization, it is a fact that most people will have many career and or job changes in a lifetime. Some of these changes will be forced on us while others will be voluntary. For example for work/life balance, or health and lifestyle reasons.

A better definition is to include other types of career goals that you might have.

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