 All career
plans are subject to change as life seldom runs along a predictable path.
Career plans must be flexible to account for changes in market needs, the
economy, globalization and overseas
competition, company priorities, and required job skills. All can affect
what your current job consists of, and what it might be in the future.
The best advice may be to embrace a positive, flexible,
forward-looking attitude. Be prepared for the next job, whatever and
wherever that may be. Downsizing, layoffs, and gaps between
projects can transform into positive growth, new opportunities, and
expanding skills if flexibility is part of your career plan. Other
considerations for your career plan may include:
- Personal
interests and values
- Skills you
have; skills you need
- Personal goals
for the next 5, 10, 25 years
- Financial needs
or goals
- Preference for
large or small company or work environment
- Geographic
preferences
- Goals for
growth (skills, experiences, finances, personal)
Career management does not
end once you secure a job; it is a life-long effort. Once you are on the
job, take control of your career. Seek advice from managers,
mentors,
peers and colleagues, but keep control of your own career. Only you can
decide what paths and choices are best for you. You need to discover what
training and education will increase your value and your satisfaction.
Please be sure to use the
resources of the Career Cornerstone Center in conjunction with the
guidance of a counselor, teacher, or other who can help provide you with
advice on career planning. While we strive to make sure our data
is current, we recommend that you check data, accreditation, tuition
levels, and employment opportunities in a specific field with other
sources before finalizing a career path.
 Understanding
Fields
Part of planning a
career is determining what field you might like to work in.
Click here to explore the wide range of degree
fields to choose from within science, technology, engineering,
mathematics, computing, and healthcare.
Understanding
Academic Degrees
A wide range of
careers are available in science, technology, engineering, mathematics,
computing, and healthcare for those with different types of academic
degrees. Find out more about
different academic degrees including associate's, bachelors, and
master's.
 Job
Hunting
Many
factors should be considered during the search for a position. Salary, location, size
of company, opportunity for advancement, scope of work, projects,
educational support, and others should be evaluated. In any market,
networking is an excellent way to surface job
opportunities. Also, professional associations
can sometimes offer insight into market concentrations and available
positions.
There are a variety of websites that can help in
identifying positions and narrowing a job search:
University/College
Career Centers
Many colleges and
universities have good online career centers that can help you not only
explore the resources of the school, but also find out about
school-based support for career research and job hunting.
Click here to
sample some online university career center sites.
Coops
and Internships
Coops or internships
provide a great opportunity to gain real work experience in the field
you are studying or considering. Find out
more...
Career Cornerstone Center Profile Excerpts
The following excerpts from Cornerstone profiles offer suggestions
regarding career planning, or how their own career plans shifted over
time:
 James W. Forbes, P.E.
Research Engineer
Ford Motor Company
Dearborn, MI
"There's a lot of career planning that goes on, and early on they ask you
'do you want to go into management?' 'do you want to stay in engineering?'
'what rotations do you want?' There a whole training period for the first
couple of years. Most people who come into Ford will rotate through a
number of different areas."
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 Beth
Lemen
Site Operations Manager, P&G Pharmaceuticals
Procter & Gamble
Cincinnati, OH
"I started out wanting to be an engineer, in high school. Just through
being very good at math and science, and getting coaching from my guidance
counselors. When I started looking at schools in-state, I looked at
chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. Any school that had
either of those. When I first started college, I actually went for
chemical engineering. I took two semesters of chemical engineering, and
decided it wasn't really what I wanted. I thought I wanted it because I
was good at chemistry. I then took a semester of a mixture of courses. I
took some electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and one civil
engineering course, to try to feel for what I liked. And the courses I
tended to excel in, understood, could reapply, were mechanical-engineering
courses. And, so, I switched my major, my sophomore year. Went to school,
over the summer, to catch up with my classes. And I've continued on from
there."
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 James Monroe
Associate Attorney
Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner
Washington, DC
"I think that if you talk to most patent attorneys, they will say that
they never planned to become one. It was happenstance. People don't think,
when they're in high school, that they're going to become a patent
attorney, because they don't know about it. Only children of patent
attorneys think about it. I was studying chemical engineering at
Washington University in St. Louis and realized about halfway through my
junior year that I really didn't want to be a conventional engineer. I
wanted to go into something more business- or marketing-related, something
besides just conventional engineering. So I did research, and it was hard
to find out about alternative career paths. At the time, I just happened
to be doing part-time work for a dean at the law school. One day she
mentioned patent law. It stuck in my mind, so I started writing to
people."
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 Thomas
Bean
Corporate Counsel
Lucent Technologies
Holmdel, NJ
"I would say the things that I'm most proud about are the time
that I spent on introspection and taking career counseling, and even
psychotherapy. I read one book on career counseling, or a section of it,
at any rate, that said that it's not really possible to excel to your
complete potential if you don't seek out a mentor or a career counselor or
some type of therapeutic counseling and ask others to be your sounding
board. So that you get feedback from others who have "objectivities" that
you don't have. You have to test yourself, to find out and ask yourself,
"Is what I'm doing worth it because it takes an awful lot of energy. It
takes an awful lot of time." You only go through it once and you can look
inside and make the tough decisions to change and let go of things. In my
case, I would say what I've been most proud of, is the ability to let go
of things that I had tremendous investments in -- even moving outside of
my financial and academic investments in mainstream mechanical engineering
and working in other areas that have been offshoots from that. That is
something that has been the most significant -- and I would say, in
retrospect -- the thing that I'm most pleased with. My ability to change.
I think you're as good as your ability to change is robust."
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