How to make your career plan

[Nipa Sarker]

People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next ten or twenty years. Others come to us saying they want to figure out "the right career for them".

The problem with all of this is that, as we've seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change:

You'll change – more than you think.
The world will change – many industries around today won't even exist in twenty years.
You'll learn more about what's best for you – it's very hard to predict what you're going to be good at ahead of time.
In a sense, there is no single "right career for you". Rather, the best option will keep changing as the world changes and you learn more. Giving up on planning and setting goals probably isn't wise either.

This is the planning paradox – especially when you're early in your career, most 'plans' will radically change long before they're completed, but we still benefit from having them.

Given this, how should you make a career plan?

Here we'll explain how to take your shortlist of options from earlier and make a plan that's both specific and flexible, while reducing risk.
You can make a flexible plan by using the A/B/Z plan:

Plan A is the top option you'd like to pursue. If you're relatively confident about what you want to do in the medium-term, focus on that. If you're more uncertain, look to try out several different options before deciding which to aim for. If you're very uncertain, plan to do more research while building flexible career capital.
Plan Bs are the promising nearby alternatives you can switch into if Plan A doesn't quite go as intended.
Plan Z is your temporary fallback in case everything goes wrong—something easy to achieve. Having a Plan Z helps you take bigger risks.
Review your plan at least once a year – you can use our tool.
Your plan should change as you learn more, but it's very easy to get stuck on the path you're already on. Not changing course when a better option exists is one of the most common decision-making mistakes identified by psychologists, and is called the "sunk cost fallacy" or "status quo bias".

To help avoid this mistake, you need to keep reviewing your plan. Here are a few ideas:

Schedule a time to review your career in six months or a year. We made a career review tool to make that easy. Work through the questions by yourself, and then try to justify your thoughts to a friend or mentor. Other people are better able to spot the sunk cost fallacy, and having to justify your thinking to someone else has been shown to reduce your degree of bias.
Set check-in points. Make a list of signs that would tell you you're on the wrong path, and commit to reassessing if those occur. For example, publishing lots of papers in top journals is key to advancement in academic careers, so you could commit to reassessing the academic path if you don't publish a certain number of papers by the end of your PhD.
Just like a startup entrepreneur, the aim is keep testing and improving your plan over time.

Now, you can use our tool to make your own plan. It takes you through all the steps above.

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/