How Career Planning Is the Worst Thing You Could Do For Your Career

There’s an old saying that goes “If ye are prepared, you shall not fear.” People have traditionally tried to make a plan for what they want for a career, and have gone to school for that particular thing. However, with the changing landscape of technology and education, planning a career these days is possibly the worst thing you could do for yourself.

An article recently published on Forbes.com details about why career planning used to be a good idea. “You had heard the traditional advice about how to plan your career even before you had one: Determine where you want to be in five (or 10 or 20) years and work backwards from there, figuring out what courses to take and/or what assignments you should fill in order to get the job that you covet. That advice used to work well when the economy was stable; the rate of change was far slower, and competition was far more localized. That, to state the obvious, is no longer the case.”

So how do you set yourself up to succeed when there’s a good chance by the time you graduate, everything you just payed your university thousands of dollars to learn will be obsolete?

Changing the Way You Think About Career Planning

The way we’ve been taught to think about career planning is too concrete to allow for any flexibility. Pick a field, go to school, get a career. That still works for very specific jobs (think nursing or dentistry or teaching), however it doesn’t work for the majority of professions available to us today. Consider a technology company like Apple. Apple made a comeback in a big way in 2001 with the introduction of the iPod, and if you look at that first iPod compared to what we have now, that thing seems ancient. But it was only 13 years ago. One of the reasons Apple was able to succeed is because they developed a platform that allowed for progression, instead of picking one thing and sticking to it.

Applying this to your own life might seem kind of tricky, but it’s not as difficult as it sounds. Your first step should be to figure out what you like. What are you good at? What types of things interest you? Move towards those types of things. When you take that first step, you will learn something. Incorporate what you learn from taking that step and keep on walking until you’ve started a business, landed a dream job, or achieved what you set out to do. The key is simply to remain flexible and willing to take advantage of new situations. This may sound difficult, but the results will be well worth it.