How To Create Your Ideal Career Path (With Actionable Steps)

Whether or not you (will) live your dream job boils down to your answer to this question: “Do you have a robust strategy for your career?”

Have you created your ideal career path?

If you’ve ever wondered why others are always looking forward to their working days while you wake up groaning and hoping that the day will be over soon, then it’s time for you to rethink your whole career strategy - or create a new one.

There are strong relations between success and good planning.

People with the right career path know what they can bring to the market. They are also among the tiny percentage of people with crystal clear and articulate goals. These two components, along with solid strategizing and planning, are the keys to a successful career. They are your success insurance.

To achieve your deepest, most exciting career ambitions, one needs to take a step back from their day-to-day life, look at the bigger picture, and ask themselves the question, “where do I want to be in 10 years?”

Armed with the right strategy and plan, everybody CAN have a fulfilling career. All you need is a little time for a career strategizing session, develop a plan, and build the will-power to stick to it over sustained periods (grit).

To help you jumpstart your journey in realizing your dream career, here are some actionable steps that you can do to create your ideal career path.

01. Identify Your Career Options

Knowing your options is essential before you make any decision or plans for the future. This is also true if you are planning your future professional career.

Start by doing a self-assessment to build up your plan. Know what type of person you are. Review your interest, skills, and the value of your goals.

1. Leverage Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability

The right way to weight out your options against each other is to leverage the desirability, feasibility, and viability framework.

In the desirability circle, gauging whether or not the market will welcome what you’re offering, of course, finding a product-market fit will take a series of iterations, experiments, and a lot of work. Still, it is a critical component to consider when selecting and prioritizing your ideal career path.

In the feasibility circle, take an inside-out perspective and honestly assess each of your capabilities’ strengths. This could be programming, copy-writing, sales, or anything.

In the viability circle, ask yourself whether or not a career path makes sense for you to do. Can this career path sustain me financially? Will I be enjoying my work? Or whether this role be too time-consuming?

The intersection is the representative of your ideal career. Now let’s see how to find it.

2. Make a List of Your Skills

Now, let’s make a list of your skills! Maybe you are good with words, or you can speak in front of the public without breaking a sweat, or perhaps you can draw a flawless building perspective while finishing your lunch. List them all.

You can prioritize your skill for the professional development of your career. Decide your best talent, then compare your gift with the others to make sure you know about your real passion skill and what is needed to reach your goal. Choose the ones that are essential to reach your goal.

3. Make A List of Your Interest

Aside from your skills, you have to take your interests or hobbies into account. The items can be anything from gardening to playing classical guitar to mountain climbing to tinkering with technical stuff. The idea is that the list should contain everything you would still do even if nobody pays you.

The reason behind this is to use something that you like as the starting point of determining your future career and the kinds of industries that you will choose. This is also applied to the kinds of jobs that you choose.

Not everybody wants to be an executive director of a company. Some individuals might prefer to be free and take freelancing jobs instead of the more stable occupations working in an office and climbing the corporate ladder.

If you have to do something that you don’t enjoy for the rest of your life won’t bring you any satisfaction. Your life would be a living hell.

4. Find the Sweet Intersection

Now take the list of your skills and your interests and find the intersection between the two. Your ideal career should be doing something that you love, and you are good at it. In other words, your skill should match your interest.

But what you want to find is not just any intersection. You should discover the “sweet” intersection. Your ideal career should also be something that has a considerable market. Or to say it in another way, there are people who would pay you to do it.

For example, even if you love to watch TV all day and are good at it, is there anybody who would pay you good money to sit and watch TV all day?

5. Make a List of Potential Challenges and Solutions

Armed with a list of things that you love, are good at, and have a sizable market, you have a clearer picture of your future career. But the only predictable thing about life is that it’s unpredictable.

You should also think about the challenges, such as competitors. Many of your competitors have the same skill sets as you do. Plan the solution to face the potential problems that will come along the way.

After finding the possible solutions, you can formulate the best choices for you. Knowing this will minimize the risks that you might come across along the way.

6. Find Your “Why”

Nobody lives his/her life without meeting any challenges along the way. Some people stop and give up; some continue despite the difficulties. What’s the difference?

Those who reach their goals know their “Why”.

Their “Why” is the reason behind their actions. This is what keeps them going during the worst of times. Maybe it’s the family, perhaps it’s for the greater good of the world, or perhaps it’s something personal. But it would be different for every person.

Giving up is easy. There are millions of reasons to do so. You need an anchor to reach your goal. Find your “Why”. And it must be strong enough to keep you on track to your success. We’ll discuss building your motivation later.

02. Design SMART Goals for Your Ideal Career Path

You’ve set your destination, and you know where you need to go and why you need to go there. Now it’s time to plan on how to get there.

An excellent framework to start with is the “SMART” framework, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

Let’s look at them one by one.

1. Specific

“Specific” means well-defined, clear, or unambiguous. To make your goal specific, you need to ask the five Ws:

Who: Who is involved in this goal?

What: What do I want to accomplish?

Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?

When: When do I want to achieve this goal?

Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal?

Instead of saying, “I want to have a great career,” you should say, “I want to get accepted in X university and take the Y major to be able to be Z.”

2. Measurable

What is the indicator of your success? How far should you go and how much should you do?

You should have some criteria to measure your success. Without them, you can’t determine your progress and know whether you’re on track to reach your goal.

In terms of education, you can measure the progress by tracking the lessons you take, the scores you get, the exams you pass, etc.

3. Attainable

Also known as achievable, this point is talking about setting goals that you can achieve. Or breaking a larger goal into smaller and more attainable goals. By doing this, you can figure out ways to work towards the desired result.

Don’t set your goals to be too easy. You’ll get bored and lose interest. On the other hand, don’t make it too hard either. If you think it’s impossible, you won’t even bother to try.

The question that you should ask yourself is whether you have the resources and capabilities to achieve the goal? If not, what are you missing? You could use stories of others who have done it successfully before as your references.

4. Relevant

The goal should be relevant to you and only to you. As Steve Jobs famously said: “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”

That’s why we spend the earlier stage to find out what is the ideal career path for you based on your interests and skills.

5. Time-Bound

It means that your goal has a start and finish date. Otherwise, there will be no sense of urgency, and you will have less motivation to achieve it.

You must answer this: “By when do you want to achieve your goal?”. Write it down and use all of your resources to make sure you arrive at the finish line on time.

A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

Now that you’ve set the goal, you can continue to the next stage: writing down the action plan. Also, don’t forget to set the timeline and expectations. 

03. Set Your End Goal And Motivation

Using the SMART methodology discussed above, you can start your career development plan by setting your end goal. Set your main objective before you start the journey. This should also help you build the motivation to help you stay on track and reach your ultimate goal - just like a loyal assistant to help you reach your goals.

1. Set One Specific End Goal

It’s impossible to start a journey if you don’t know your destination. So the first thing you need to do to create a career development plan is to find out where you want to go. You need to look for your end goal.

But this end goal should be a specific one. There are virtually unlimited professions that you can choose, but you should pick one industry, focus only on one occupation. Specialize in one thing. Just like a journey, you can’t have many destinations. Do not set too many goals as it will confuse you and you will end up achieving none of them.

It doesn't mean that you can’t have many things that you want to do or achieve in life. In fact, you should have as many as you want. Don’t limit yourself. You should have just one primary goal in life regarding your career. This should be your priority.

2. Make Sure That It’s Aligned With Your Passion

One other thing to consider is that your goal has to be related to your passion. Your journey should take you to the place that you want to go to. What is the point of preparing for a journey if you don’t like where you are going? Even if you continue, a simple obstacle will stop you as you initially don’t want to go there.

If you love finance, don’t set your goal to be a government official - even if your parents said you should. Make up your mind to maintaining and directing your ideal career path so it’s in alignment with your passion.

3. Build Your Motivation to Stay on the Ideal Career Path

Life is full of obstacles. In pursuing your career, you will indeed find a bunch of them. Giving up is so easy.

So how will you stay on the course and not go sideways? You will need motivation. Powerful motivation.

Loving what you are doing helps, but sometimes it’s not enough. To build a strong motivation, you need faith (and we are not talking about religious faith).

As Tony Robbins said in one of his mega sessions, life is like treasure hunting. You don’t know whether your treasure is out there and how long it will take to find it - if you ever find it.

To be able to keep on going, there are three things that you need:

1. You need faith that your treasure IS out there.

2. You need faith that you CAN FIND your treasure

3. You need faith that after you find your treasure, all your effort will be WORTH IT.

If you have these three faiths, you will stay on your course no matter what happens along the way.

04. Create Actionable Steps For Your Career Development Plan

Having a general idea of what you want to achieve is not enough. To reach your goal, you should create and develop a career plan. This is the strategy that you will use to go from A to B, from the current you to the ideal future you. This career plan will also help you be the manager of your own ideal career path. It will provide you with a map you can follow easily and a sequence of steps arranged orderly.

It will help you focus as systematizing the plan produces amazing measurable growth.

1. Develop Specific but Flexible Steps

You would want to stick to your SMART goals in developing your steps. The career development plan should be specific enough that the steps are actionable, but it should also be flexible enough that you can adjust the steps along the way.

For example, “having a clearer mind” is not an actionable step, but “practicing meditation for 30 minutes every morning at 6” is. This step is also a flexible one, as you can adjust the time if you need it.

To determine the steps, you need to know where you are right now and where you want to be. Then divide the gaps into major milestones (or mini-goals), and fill in the space between milestones with a cluster or clusters of actionable steps. If these steps are still not actionable enough, you can consider them as sub-milestones, sub-sub milestones, and so on until they are actionable enough.

If you belong to the organizing department, you can also color-code the steps based on the types of action and/or urgency. For example, you can use red for urgent actions and orange for the less urgent, green for the finished task, blue for daily routines, yellow for a one-time task, purple for the education-oriented task, and other colors for other types of actions.

And why not take it to the next level and create beautiful infographics and charts that are pleasing to the eye? But maybe we’re stretching a bit too far here.

But basically, there’s no fixed rule here. You can be creative and adjust your plan according to your preferences.