Starting a career planner is a way to help document your professional growth and is a helpful tool for keeping track of significant events throughout your journey. It’s also a great method to plan and outline what your future ambitions are and where you hope to be later on in your career.

There are numerous benefits when writing in a journal, and regardless of your line of work, a career planner is an effective way to reduce your stress. Here are some great tips and strategies for journaling.

Developing Your Personal Brand

Before you dive into your journal, you should take some time to create a brand for yourself. Your brand is essential to establishing how you’d like businesses to view you. 

Showcasing your brand is a way to showcase your personality while providing your relevant skills and abilities. Some ways that you can communicate your personal brand effectively and consistently to employers and hiring managers include the following:

• Creative colour combination and design – creatively expressing yourself can carry out through a CV, cover letter, social media platforms, or even your website. Consider making a colour pattern or specific font that showcases your brand that you can consistently use across all channels.
• Your business card – a business card has all the relevant information about yourself that you can use at events to network and build connections. It is an excellent way for other leaders and executives within your industry to get in touch with you. 

Creating Your Career Journal

Your career journal should incorporate details of events throughout your career with regular updates on experiences, observations, and your line of work. You can record personal preferences, challenges within the workplace, and regular reviews to learn where you are in your career and set up goals for the future.

Career journaling offers many benefits:

• Expressive medium for writing down new ideas and developing milestones throughout your career;
• Setting up your professional career goals and aspirations;
• Processing feelings, thoughts, and experiences from work;
• Tracking and monitoring accomplishments and recognition from the workplace; and
• Review and monitor your patterns and habits to make adjustments and fix problems.

Most of the advantages of creating a career journal can bring work only if you start one as early as possible. Consider jumping into building a career planner journal when you begin a new chapter or change industries. 

Making Your Career Planner Journal

Some strategies to help you begin your career journal to get you started:

• Define your Purpose: journaling helps provide clarity for you within your career, and you can identify and reach specific targets and further define your goals. Determine what events and experiences are worth writing about and tracking down.
• Create a consistent method: you need to figure out how to track your experiences, events, and achievements. For instance, you can take a pen to paper with Erin Condren’s weekly LifePlanner or type it all out on your laptop, computer, or tablet. 
• Consider the format: you may want a format that includes prompts to help you answer specific questions about work, such as with the life planner. You could also utilize a more free-form journal. Either way, you may want to include looking at subjects within the workplace to write about, such as:
• Setting your career goals;
• Describing events and experiences that occur at work;
• Tracking your progress to reach new milestones;
• How you spend your time and manage it at work;
• Finding strengths within your abilities;
• Locating areas where you can improve; and
• Discovering what you enjoy about your job;
• Set a specific time each day: setting aside time to write is essential to keep consistent and be able to have more clarity. Consider beginning with a set time once a week and increasing it if you have the ability.
• Track your progress: one last tip to help with your career planner journaling is to ensure you go back and analyze your path. You can’t effectively create a future without knowing where you’ve been, what you’ve learned, and what you can do differently moving forward.

For example, could you benefit from taking additional college courses or perhaps getting a license or certification to help you advance? You may only realize it once you start tracking your progress, but it could be a helpful step to solidify your career.

Organizing Your Career Journal

Simply writing your thoughts down can help you understand them better, but journaling has also been proven to help reduce stress since it serves as a necessary emotional release. Organizing your career journal produces similar benefits when you’re anxious about your career. 

As you begin organizing your journal, you can start with some of these helpful strategies:

• Put dates on all of your entries so that you have a way to reference so you know when specific instances, events, or experiences occurred.
• Write down ideas as a way to log important things and events. You’ll have something to reference and even develop useful tools or resources within your work.
• Map out your vision in the long term so you can more easily identify the steps you need to take to reach that goal. The journal can help you break down your more considerable accomplishments into smaller, more manageable objectives that you can track (and reach).

Career Planners for Success

Your journal doesn’t have to be anything extensive or extreme. You might just simply want to make some bullets to list out things that you accomplished each day, ideas that could help improve work processes, or how to prioritize your workload. 

But using a planner and journaling for your career can help you visualize and make better decisions in your career journey. It’s a self-exploration tool that, with consistency, can offer multiple advantages that include problem-solving and supplying valuable knowledge. 

The added benefit of impacting to counteract the adverse effects of stress and helping provide clarity for your goals will only ensure that you improve your job future. Making journaling a habit can bring about things you need that offer more opportunities within your career.

Photo by RF._.studio

Guest Writer