Personal Professional Plan

I created this document a few weeks ago and sent it to a bunch of different people, but unfortunately it hasn't had any traction. I'm thinking of creating multiple branches for myself in order to look at my options from a wider scope. I think it would be useful to perform this exercise with the intent of staying in your current company, with the intent of changing companies and also without any company in mind.

This is a pretty rough draft and any suggestions as to why this wouldn't help, what could make it better or more useful are welcome. Thanks.

Personal Professional Plan

This is based on an idea that maybe business plans aren’t just for business, but a lot of it can be applied to an individual. I believe this can be a useful tool for an individual trying to develop a strategy of any objective. In this case the objective is to maximize the amount of motivation, reward and fulfillment you get out of your work. Because this is going to be different for everyone, nobody else is going to be able to do this as well as you can do if for yourself. I know it looks like a lot of hard work and it is, but if you want to get somewhere I think you got to know where that is.

1. Executive Summary

A lot of this section should probably be done at the end, but I think the Mission section can be done first. For this particular plan we have a predefined Objective, but feel free to modify to be more specific.

1.1. Objectives

My objective is to do work that motivates, rewards and fulfills me.

1.2. Mission

This is going to be one of the most challenging sections to fill out, but it’s going to help define the way you work everyday so I would put a lot of thought into it. Don’t worry trying to make it perfect. I believe that it should be revisited every few months anyways.

1.3. Keys to Success

This may be easier to also do after finishing the rest.

2. The Work

This section defines more specifically the kind of work that’s going to achieve your objective. Some questions you may want to ask yourself when you’re trying to figure this out are: What work has challenges that you enjoy? What kind of work motivates you? What kind of work provides you with the kind of reward you seek?

When I was trying to fill out this section I didn’t put an exact position, but rather I just made a list of general characteristics of the type of work I think I’d enjoy, then I tried to find a career direction that matched.

3. Work Analysis

This is where you put why you want to do the work. Not just because its “rewarding, motivating and fulfilling”, but why they are these things. What this will help do is to identify what qualities of the work are important to you. This is where you validate that the work that you choose in the previous section matches what’s important to you.

4. Personal SWOT

Okay, now that you said what type of work you want to do and why here’s where you start to figure out how you’re going to do the things you want to do. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

This has been a strategic planning tool used since the 60’s for many things from business plans, projects, organizations and individuals. It’s not intended to be a pure formulaic way to create the strategy, but rather it’s a way of creating a starting point for a strategy.

Here the external is the company you work for.

· Strengths: your attributes which are helpful to achieving your goal. What skills do I have to do the work I want to do? Where do I find my flow ( http://austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm)?

· Weaknesses: your attributes of the individual which are keeping you from achieving your goal. What skills do you need to develop to do the work I want to do? If you’re not exactly sure what these are go get information on people who are doing what you want to do?

· Opportunities: external conditions which are helpful to achieving your goal. What types of processes or opportunity exist within the department that allow me to do the work I want to do?

· Threats: external conditions which are preventing you from achieving your goal. What’s lacking in the department that make’s it hard to do the work I want to do? What can the department do to help you do the work you want to do?

5. Strategy

This section is where you put your start to find your path to your goal. Here’s where you say how you’re going to leverage strengths, improve or reduce the influence of weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and mitigate or adapt to threats. For example, if one of your weaknesses is a lack of knowledge in a particular area then your strategy would be to get training or going back to school. If your department through the company provides partial tuition reimbursement, it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of. Another strategy would be to improve on particular strengths to help you even more qualified to do the work you want. You may want to write out several different strategies at first.

6. Long Term Goals (I would put a solid deadline here)

These are long term action items. They should come from your strategy that developed in the previous section.

7. Short Term Goals (I would put a solid deadline here)

Take you long term action items and find short term (about 1 year) goals you can make from them.

Now go back and fill in the first section. Your Mission should be your mind for everything you’re doing at work. The Keys to Success are also helpful because they will help keep you on track.

Good luck. Any feedback is welcome.