Defining Career Development with The Career Explorer’s Journal

What is career development? What does it mean when the words career and development are used together like this? There are lots of definitions but my guess is you’re interested in what career development means to you.

I once heard someone describe career development as, ‘the feeling I’m going somewhere I want to go’. It’s still my favourite way to think about this subject but even this definition leaves big questions hanging. Personal questions like When do I get that feeling? Where do I want to go? and How do I get there?

If career development is a feeling that means we all need to get personal before we understand it. Only you can say when you feel it and to do this you need to go looking for it. To boldly, deliberately seek and explore career development. To discover it, to learn everything you can about it and help the feeling grow for you (and only you) over time.

Because the search for career development can sound like mission impossible, we put everything anyone might need to get themselves started (and feel continually supported) into a handy guide called The Career Explorer’s Journal. This journal was written to encourage & accompany individual career journeys like yours and share inspirational development stories between global career explorers like us.

We believe everyone – and we mean everyone – can find and feel career development. We know this because we see so many people go on this journey. We listen to their stories, hear them talk about their work, share their experiences and show us real-world career development taking place again and again.

Your career may be different to everyone else’s but a handful of elements make our development journeys the same. Core elements like Values, Talents and Goals can be different for everyone but they’re central to every career. Everyone has them and the more we learn about them, the further our career development journeys go. The more it feels like we’re getting somewhere we want to go.

So that’s our definition of career development. There are others, some of them sound similar but this is ours and we think it deserves to be out there. It’s the only definition we see tried and tested every day. It’s the only definition we trust for our careers too, thanks to thousands of years of exploring plus around five years of journeys with career explorers too.

[Image courtesy of kool_skatkat on Flicker.com]

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