Developing Your Career
We’re all individuals, with our own experiences, skills, ambitions, likes, dislikes and hopes for the future. The question is how you turn all of that into a career, and then goals and activities to make sure you achieve all those things to which you aspire. Here are tools and support to help you.
Drive Your Career
Career development or growth is the lifelong process of learning new skills, finding purpose in your work, and advancing along your career path. We appreciate that it can be difficult to know where to start when thinking about your career, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, there are lots of different tools available to enable you to drive your career progression, which you can find on the Career Development page. Examples include:
Complete a career drivers’ questionnaire.
Simply put, career drivers are a tool to discover what you enjoy in a job. They can help you make informed choices based on this information, so you find a career that’s a good fit for you. As well as this, they can also teach you to play on your strengths in your current role.
Complete the Find My Why assessment
This is an opportunity for you to develop awareness of your preferences and values – enabling you to connect with your purpose and support your career journey.
Career Conversations
Once you know what you value in your career, you can start thinking about how you turn this into an actionable career plan. This is where a career conversation with either your manager or mentor can be beneficial.
The idea of a career conversation is to:
- Talk about your career progression, goals, and aspirations.
- Have some honest and constructive feedback to help you understand what you might need to do to progress.
- Get some advice and learn from someone else’s experiences.
- Share ideas about ways you could develop yourself.
- Discuss how your manager/mentor might be able to support you.
For further guidance relating to career conversations, development plans and general career information, please go to our career development page here.
We have also developed a series of resources to support you in kickstarting your career and personal development. These guides are aimed at helping you take ownership and accountability for your own development, but also drive your future in Equans.
As part of this toolkit which you can access here, you will find resources on the following:
- Planning Your Career Guide
- Career Conversation Guides
- Career Development Plan Template
- Personal Development Planning
- Networking
- Leading in a Remote World
Setting Personal Goals
One of the easiest, but most important things that you can do in order to support your career development is to set personal goals. If you haven’t already got a Personal Development Plan, this can be a great place to start in helping you think about your future and what you would like to achieve.
A Personal Development Plan (PDP) is a written account of self-reflection and improvement, which doubles up as a detailed action plan used to fulfil personal or career-based goals (such as wanting to improve your leadership skills, public speaking, or time management-skills). It works by allowing you to establish your aims, recognise your strengths and development areas, and identify where you might need more support.
At Equans, we want to provide everybody with the right tools and resources to effectively support their career. That’s why, on our Intranet Page, you can find a step by step PDP guide and template to support you in creating your Personal Development Plan here.
Exploring Career Paths
Equans Skills Academies are a one stop shop for career development in our business. They offer curated learning pathways that support employees from induction, through the development of their career. They also offer information and support for those exploring other job families in the business. Skills Academies are job family specific, and the scheme expands continually to include new roles. If you’re unsure what’s next for you or what a career at Equans could look like, this is a great please to start.
You can find out more about our Skills Academies by visiting the following link. The Skills Academies are being continuously being updated, so if you can’t see your job role, or aspiring job roles, don’t worry as these will be launched shortly.
Mentoring
What is Mentoring?
Mentoring involves helping and guiding another person to support their personal and professional development. The purpose is for a mentee to receive support, and be guided and motivated by the mentor’s knowledge, experience, advice, and contacts.
At Equans, we believe in empowering our employees to achieve their full potential, and that’s why we have created a mentoring scheme that connects you with experienced colleagues who can offer guidance, support, and advice as you pursue your professional goals.
Similarly, by becoming a mentor, you have the opportunity to develop your leadership and interpersonal skills, reflect on your own practice, and use your experience and expertise to support the development of others. You may even learn from your mentee and gain new perspectives that you hadn’t once considered.