Career Planning
Thinking generally about careers
Whether you are a student soon to leave school and are considering tertiary study, a tertiary student thinking about your transition to the workforce, or a person with work experience, it is useful to think about how your career might develop.
This is not the same as “planning your career”. Planning a career in detail is not very helpful, as you never know what is around the corner. However it is very useful to think about what you like doing, and what skills you will need to do that type of work.
Up until the 1980s, careers tended to be quite predictable. We stayed longer in each job, and our career growth was often in one organisation. We worked in more structured environments, and, in return for this structure, we had more security.
Since the 1980s, careers have become much more fluid. You will not be likely to spend most of your working life in one organisation, or even within one industry or sector. Self-employment and contractor/consulting work will become more common. In professional disciplines, this is likely to mean higher pay but less security. During the course of your career you will have to make trade-offs between pay and security.
Of course, we would like you to consider local government as a place to work. We encourage you to acquire the skills that would be useful in the local government sector. Yet we also recognise that, in the future, your career might take you in and out of our sector. There will be benefits for local government in that also.
In the future, you will keep learning, both in the normal course of life and work, and in the formal education environment. Some of this your employers will provide but some you will provide yourself.
You might also come to a point where you must choose between staying an expert in the technical aspects of what you do and becoming a manager of other technical experts. You will discover that being a manager of staff is a very different job to being a technical expert. The best engineer in the world may be a terrible manager. If you feel you would like to manage staff, make sure you develop strong interpersonal skills early on.
To summarise, your formal education, your work and life experience, and your career aims should give you:
- the specific ‘technical’ (or ‘hard’) skills you need to do the kind of work you want to do; and
- the flexibility, adaptability, and interpersonal skills (‘soft’ skills) you need to be able to maximise your own career development and success.
We recommend www.careers.govt.nz if you want to get more help about your career choices.