Your Career Change Project. Keeping You Organised And On Track.

Keeping track of your journey

What goes in your Career Change Project File?

Well, anything and everything that comes up for you as a result of doing the career planning exercises on this site. They all make a contribution to your thinking and reflection about your career change.

As you will see, there are lots of ideas and exercises on this site that you can try. You need to work through a good selection of these to build up a picture of who you are and what you want from a career.

Some of the exercises pose a simple question and ask you to reflect on it and write down your thoughts. Others are more structured and may mean going through a checklist, creating a mind map, asking for feedback from others or brainstorming with your Career Change Buddy.

With all the exercises and reflection you are doing, it is important to keep asking yourself:

‘What is this exercise telling me? What insights about me are bubbling up here? What am I learning about myself?’

Your Career Change Project File is where you capture both the results of the exercises and your thinking about the results.

Keep reviewing the Project File

Whenever you add anything new to your Project File, flick through what is already in there. You never know when one of the exercises or your thoughts about it will just click into place with something else in the File and lead to a breakthrough moment.

This happened with one of my clients who knew she was interested in teaching, but hated the idea of the formally structured education system.

Having done the Myers Briggs Personality Indicator with me (a full version of the short test on this site) she realised that her personality preferences meant she needed to work in an unstructured way.

When she was looking through her File, she came up with the idea of ‘teaching unconventionally’ and is now developing a range of informal, interactive workshops for parents and their children to promote early years learning.

Summarising your findings

As you work through the career change process and complete the exercises on this site, it is a good idea to a summary sheet of some kind to pull your thoughts together. Have a look at the one I suggest here. But feel free to design one of your own if you prefer.

Use what you have collected in your Project File together with the contents of your Career Ideas Log to identify your top career choices.

The Career Change Project File is potentially a wonderful reminder to you of what makes you a unique and special person, with your own particular range of skills, strengths and qualities.

You may find that you still refer back to it long after you have changed your career!