CAREER PLANNING IS DEAD! CAREER MAPPING IS THE ANSWER.

Career planning was all about taking into consideration possible job types available currently and guessing the type of jobs that may be available in the future. Based on the information available, we decide on the area of education and professional skill sets training we should get into while giving only cursory attention to our likes, passions, and things that we enjoy doing. Career planning is all about aligning our academic and personal learning with the potential of earning money and getting successful. One of the biggest parameters of a successful career is our capacity to earn money.

This type of career planning is results in everybody pushing their children to get educated to become doctors and engineers. Everybody wants to be in the mainstream to be safe. Finding work in the areas of our passion and converting these activities of our interest into money making projects or businesses is not promoted.

This type of career planning has helped us a lot till now. But the situation is changing very drastically. 4^th Industrial revolution has already started. New technologies and work opportunities are sweeping the entire world. New advanced technologies are changing the nature of almost every job that we are accustomed to today. This was the focus of my first book Missing the Bus – Basic Life skills. Modern cutting edge technologies and innovations in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Genomics, 3D manufacturing, Big Data & Analytics and large scale automation are changing the entire landscape of modern workplace globally. Career planning in the sense of guessing about our future jobs and getting a relevant education now is not going to work. Simply because nobody can predict the nature of jobs in the near future. We are in no position to base our educational and skill set priorities based on very limited data.

Hence career planning as we know must be completely changed. Career planning to guarantee employment is not going to work, instead, career planning must be used for building and enhancing employability. Enhancing employability is not as easy as it sounds to be. It is a complex mix of academic qualification, improved basic life skills, enhanced emotional and political intelligence. This is the most critical phase in the 4^th Industrial revolution, all of us are certainly going to need a coach or a guide who can help us walk through the difficult and unchartered territory of the modern workplace. If we are planning to scrape through our schools/colleges, earn a lot of money by getting a cool traditional job, spend our career doing the same job then it is time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Career is going to be a constant process of reinventing ourselves by learning new skills, building on our strengths and working on our weaknesses. Getting educated, finding a good job and spending an entire professional career in the same job is a dead plan. Career now must be approached like an entrepreneur. Constantly looking for better opportunities, taking risks, enhancing skill sets, making tough financial/personal/professional choices, managing the focus and clarity of objectives, building great team around and the most important of all to keep ourselves in the best possible shape mentally, physically and financially to be able to sell our services and skills to the right buyer.