An individualized career plan is a personalized roadmap tailored to guide a person through the various stages of their professional journey, ensuring that each step aligns closely with their skills, interests, values, and long-term career aspirations. This plan serves as a comprehensive blueprint for career development, helping individuals to navigate the complexities of the job market, capitalize on opportunities, and achieve their professional objectives systematically. The feature I most want to add to the OOH is the ability to assist in creating Individualized Career Plans or ICPs.
Many career navigators and job counselors use the OOH as a tool for clients to work on their ICPs; however, the process is still entirely manual. Once someone finds what they want to do, they have to copy the relevant information into the ICP instrument that their counselor passes out to them. This is a time-consuming process. For some programs, the students have to print out the page from the OOH for their planned job to prove that they have done the research. With our proposed tool, this entire process can be automated, saving valuable time and making the process more efficient for everyone involved.
In PathfindersAI (did I mention I had decided on a name?), I am creating a career investigation tool that automatically records the careers you are interested in. It informs you of the average salaries, the future job growth, and the entry requirements in a user-friendly manner. Most of the information you will need for your ICP is in the application. The logical next step would be for PathfindersAI to compile that information for you into an ICP. Then, that ICP is already stored and available to the career navigator. It can be viewed, printed, or shared whenever you want. This is what technology is for; let's use it to automate the boring parts and make the process of creating an ICP more comfortable and less daunting. Why should you have to do the research and then copy it all into a series of forms (often by hand) when computers are very good at doing that?
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Here's a more detailed breakdown of the critical components of an individualized career plan:
1. Self-Assessment
This part of the ICP process is best handled by the teacher, navigator, or counselor. It requires insight and practical knowledge. In this step, the user generally identifies their Strengths and Weaknesses, Interests and Values, and Personality Traits. While it is possible to automate the administration of Myers-Briggs or other tests to help in this process, nothing available now can replace the experience and insight of a seasoned career navigator or job counselor.
2. Career Research
This part of the process is where the OOH usually is heavily featured. In this step, the user generally investigates various occupations, looks at job market trends, and studies the qualifications and requirements for those positions. All of this is available in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and in patherfindersAI. We get the raw data for pathfindersAI from the same places that the OOH did. The extra bit that we add here is that we allow the user to favorite a job profile and to create a job pathway (or an ICP) within the application, and thus, their career navigator can view the jobs they have favorited and the pathways they have created directly in the application.
3. Goal Setting
The use of technology can augment this part of the process. In this step, the user often indicates their short-term and long-term goals. Further, we are generally directing them to formulate these goals as SMART goals:
- Specific (clearly defined)
- Measurable (you can track your progress)
- Achievable (realistic and attainable)
- Relevant (aligned with your overall career plan)
- Time-bound (with a deadline for completion).
If we direct our users to select a career that interests them, the career pathways stored in our database guide them to choosing the proper positions, education, and professional development to reach that position. The pathways also show possible further goals that are available to someone who achieves the position the user is interested in. By doing this correctly, pathfindersAI helps them set their short-term and long-term goals in a SMART way.
4. Skill Development
In this part of the process, the user plans how to prepare for their future career. They will often need to indicate the formal Education and Training they will need, the means by which they will enhance the necessary skills, and perhaps also how they will stay current in their career through continuous learning.
By listing the necessary and optional elements of each of these components for each job profile, pathfindersAI will also assist in this part of the ICP process as well.
In the next version of PathfindersAI, I am looking to add data about all of the colleges, community colleges, and universities in the US into the application so that users can plan not just to get a four-year degree in marketing but also how and where they will get that degree and what it will cost. Additionally, we are already compiling a list of all the industry-recognized certifications, occupational licenses, and permits. We aim to make it easy for the user to know exactly how much time and money it should cost to achieve their dream career.
Conclusion
If we take all of this information and organize it into an attractive, easily shareable, and storable digital document, we will, at the very least, simplify the process of creating an ICP for the user and quite possibly increase its effectiveness and utility as well.
