Career Planning
5 min read
Career planning is the process of setting clear goals for the immediate, medium, and long-term future in a person's career, along with outlining how to achieve them. This page highlights the importance of having a career plan in the dairy sector, both for employees and employers. For employees, it can create clarity, demonstrate commitment, and increase the chances of finding suitable roles. For employers, it can lead to highly motivated, high-performing staff. The page also provides guidance on how to get started with and develop a career plan, and emphasizes the importance of employee ownership and support from family.
Career planning is setting out a clear understanding of what a person is looking to achieve in the immediate, medium, and longer-term future. Ideally, a career plan should also outline how that person expects to achieve their goals and by when.
Having a career plan helps to focus people, and this generally results in faster progression to achieve stages or goals.
Most people keep their career plans in their heads and never get around to writing them down – that is if they have them at all. Thinking about, discussing, and then writing down career goals is a much bigger commitment mentally, and significantly increases the chance of working towards the end goal, and therefore success.
Discuss with your employee if they have a career plan or if they want to develop one, explain what it means and potential benefits.
Find out if your employee wants your help to develop their career plan. If they choose to develop it themselves, give them the tools i.e. explain how they might go about it, and then support from a distance. If your help is needed, sit down and work through the process together making sure it is your employees plan, with you supporting, challenging and encouraging.
Developing a career plan is the same as creating goals:
It is important for your employee to get their partner and family involved (not necessarily immediately but certainly once commitments are being made). Any plans for your employees’ future, will affect them too. Support and commitment from their partner/family will help them achieve their goals, especially around sharemilking or ownership.
For immediate goals:
For medium-term goals: