The Oxford Dictionary defines career as, ‘a path through life or a profession or occupation chosen as one’s life’s work’. Career planning is a process, not something you do from 9.00am to 5.00pm on a particular Wednesday or in a four-hour training session. Career planning does not mean job hunting, it means job satisfaction.

A Peacekeeper: Job Satisfaction

Career planning addresses these three issues:

1. What skills do you have and want to use?

2. In the service of what values and preferences will those skills be deployed?

3. How can you find the best way to apply your skills?

Although we usually think of career planning as a means of mapping out how you get from Mission A to Mission B to Duty Station C, that has very little to do with what it is actually about. Rather, it is a means of thinking about how you spend your waking life – or, how you would like to be spending it. This includes not only the hours that you spend at work, but also your personal life, the time that you spend with your family on every home-leave and/or rest & recuperation break (R&R) and friends in leisure and community activities, and in personal development. Career decisions are a part of that larger canvas; you cannot take them in isolation without seeing how they affect the broader picture.

What Career Planning is Not

No one can be guaranteed a better job by preparing a career plan. Conditions may mean, for example, that no openings will occur at the time someone would like to be promoted. However, that does not mean that career planning has no value. A career plan simply gives an individual the tools to seek an opening within an organization; it does not guarantee an opening

Career Planning: A Shared Responsibility

Staff in the organization should recognize that career progression is not an entitlement, but a shared responsibility. Organizations cannot promise career success; rather, they can become a partner, with the primary responsibility for career management lying with the individual.

Role of the Individual

You can wait for something to happen or you can help ‘make it happen’. As an individual staff member, you must commit yourself to continuous growth in order to maintain or improve your current standards of performance. Your work at the United Nations is becoming increasingly more complex and demanding. New technologies, programes and demands from your clients and stakeholders necessitate continuous learning and development.

Next Career Step: How far I have invested my time & effort to plan?

As an individual mission’s staff member, you may be satisfied and want to stay and grow in your current position, or may feel that you are ready to make a career move in order to feel greater career satisfaction. At the individual mission’s staff level, whatever the situation, individual goal setting, planning and self-development are the keys to improving the chances of attaining career satisfaction.

While there are no guarantees, and many factors over which the individual has no control, e.g., availability of positions, downsizing of missions, skills and abilities of others, budgets, etc., career planning at the individual staff level does improve your chances of achieving career success.

Mission’s Senior Administration advises on several key issues.

Training and career development as strategic tools.

Career planning allows the individual to control those elements you can influence – your skills, knowledge, network(s), reputation and experiences. So, where would your next maneuver be?. Plan it ahead and the planning starts today. ;-)