The career journey can be arduous, especially if you have multiple career options in mind. Many things can change along the way, from the skills you have to the development process until achieving the desired job title.

With this in mind, people create a career roadmap to help reach these desired titles more quickly and effectively. The career plan project focuses especially on the necessary steps to achieve this desired job or organization.

Although there are different reasons why people write down career path documents, some categories and information are indispensable for it to work, regardless of the goal you are pursuing. Let’s see how to create effective career roadmaps that will lead you to the desired objective and have success as a professional.

Don’t forget to analyze each item to understand its impact on your career plan. Since people create these roadmaps for different interests, there might be slight differences between them.

Write Down Your Starting Point

More important than starting with where you want to get, you must deeply analyze your current situation. Writing down your current position or your latest application if you are not currently working can be a great starting point.

This will be your north. From here, you will see how you have evolved as a professional and all the knowledge you acquired during the path.

Choose Your Goal

It may sound strange, but we will jump right into the last item of your career roadmap, which is the final goal. After writing your starting point, you must consider what you want to achieve as a professional.

It can be a promotion, a new job, or even advancing your technical skills. Anything can be your final goal.

This will tell you all the requirements you need to focus on during your progress. Your goal is the leading information that decides all the other steps when creating your career sheet.

It is also essential to create a goal that is possible to reach. It can be challenging but never impossible. If your goal is too different from your current work, try to find something in common between both subjects.

Write the Requirements

Most goals will end up resulting in multiple requirements before achieving them. Creating a topic for each requirement is a vital part of the process.

They will show you the next step of your roadmap and will also be a big part of your career development. They have to follow a chronological order between each other and have a direct relation with your final goal.

Creating dozens of requirements can also be a problem. By doing this, your career roadmap will take several years to be completed, so be sure to choose the ones that are really indispensable to achieve the desired result.

Set Milestones

Another important point when building a career development plan is setting milestones to track your progress. They will help you visualize everything you have done and your professional evolution. The milestones can be based on requirements completed or a percentage of the roadmap, for example.

Review It

The last step in building your career roadmap is double-checking everything you wrote. All the requirements, milestones, and objectives must have a connection between them and follow a logical order. Be sure also to exclude everything that is not necessary for your career development plan, leaving only those items that will have a direct impact on your preparation as a professional.

Make sure your career roadmap is coherent with the job titles or organizations you are interested in. Make it as straightforward and objective as possible. The less information you put in it, the better.

Another excellent tip for making it clearer is to use a color code for each type of item, helping to visualize every step. Adding notes and observations can also help.

Keep It up to Date

The last thing you need to do to create an effective career roadmap is to update it constantly. As soon as you achieve a milestone or find a new challenge on your way, like finishing a course, for example, you must immediately make the necessary changes to it.

This helps you visualize how long you are taking on each step of it. Another reason for this is that, in the end, you will have a precise idea of how long it took you to complete the projects.

There are tons of tools for creating career roadmap templates, from paid tools to free online platforms. Each of them has a specific set of tools and features to help you achieve your goals.

Although there are several good options for creating your template, we highly recommend using Microsoft PowerPoint. The software is easy to use and has one of the best tool sets available in the market.

PowerPoint can create any career path template you want, no matter your goal. Additionally, the software also allows you to create many other documents, dispensing the need for specific software for each activity you might need to do.

If you don’t have a Microsoft Office activation key, you can get one with us, as our stock features virtual keys for the main software and games in the world, for a considerably lower price when compared to Microsoft Store. By doing this, you get access to all tools and features of the program and also save money that can be invested in something else.

Get this template

Template #2

Get this template

Template #3

Get this template