TECC 271: Creating a 5-Year Plan in Your Engineering Career

In this episode, I talk about career planning, and more specifically, about why you should create a 5-Year Plan. I talk about what your plan should include and provide four very important steps you can take to ensure you reach the goals you set for your five-year career plan so that you can become proactive and take control of your career. Here Are the Key Points Discussed on Creating a 5-Year Plan in Your Engineering Career: A 5-Year Plan is a long-term, strategic plan for reaching specific goals. Often, 5-year plans might include several separate goals from various areas of your career or life. Usually, this plan will have a list of long-term goals and steps to achieve those goals. 5-year plans are strategic by nature, and they can help you make sure that what you are doing today will help you get where you want to be in five years’ time. The 5-year plan is popular, as opposed to the one-year plan or the 10-year plan, because five years is far enough into the future that the planner can make major life changes, but close enough that the planner must begin working toward the goals right away. Benefits of Creating a Five-Year Plan: A 5-year plan can help you to create a focus around what’s most important to you in your career and life. It can help you avoid doing things that will make you go off-track from your goals. It shows you where you need to change things up a bit. It provides motivation to get where you want to go. It helps you see if you are on track to reach your goals. You’re certainly more likely to achieve something if you have a plan on how to get there. 4 Steps to Creating Your 5-Year Plan: 1. Identify the Key Objectives That You Would Like to Achieve Over the Next 5 Years This is where you need to brainstorm potential objectives. If you are having trouble figuring out what you want your objectives to be, think about the knowledge, experience, strengths, weaknesses, and the additional skills and experience you might need to reach your objectives. 2. Create a List of Steps or Actions You Need to Take to Achieve Each Objective Determine the kind of mindset and skill sets you will need to develop or obtain during this process. You also need to be willing to make some sacrifices, such as relocating to a different geographical location, depending on what your objectives are. 3. Create Your Goals Start by defining the actions that you will take on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. You can create weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals, but ensure that you set small manageable goals. 4. Update Your Goals Quarterly When you update your goals, make sure to also update your progress toward your objectives. Updating your goals quarterly allows you to stay on track to help you reach your annual goals easier. More in This Episode… Books Mentioned in This Episode: 5: Where will you be five years from today? Resources and Links Mentioned in This Session Include: Seller Doer Accelerator - Business Development Skills Course Engineering Leadership Accelerator - People Skills Course Level II Project Management Accelerator - PM Skills Course This Episode Is Brought to You by SSAI (Science Systems and Applications) Are you an engineer looking for an exciting career in the aerospace industry? Do you want to work on satellites and spacecraft that will monitor the health of the Earth, explore our neighbors in the solar system, and study the composition of the universe? Then you won’t want to miss SSAI’s Virtual Engineering Job Fair, Monday, March 28 from 2-6 p.m. Eastern Time! Register here!