Develop a financial plan

Your resume is a marketing document, not an autobiography that details every past role and responsibility. Your objective it trying to prompt a purchase decision, which is to invite you in for an interview.

Delve into job boards and companies' careers pages. Pull a few postings, and find what theme or criteria keep coming up. For instance, if you continually find that they need someone who can solve complex problems and navigate ambiguity, and you can do that, then put it in your resume.

Remember all of the skills you bring to the table. If you're applying for a project management role, consider highlighting the complementary skills you bring to the table. However, it should be a value add, not a random sidebar of your career.

Showing how your specific background allows you to bring a new perspective to your work will help you to stand out above other candidates.

The skills gap is often defined as the difference between the skills future workers have and the skills employers seek in new hires. But the skills gap also exists for the already employed workers and can keep growing unless they keep their skills up to date.

Understanding how your efforts fit into the bigger picture will give your work more meaning and give you new ideas to apply, so you don’t burn out or stagnate. Learning about something you’re curious about, even if it’s not useful to your job, expands your thinking, and impacts everything you do.

Review past successful roles, volunteer work, projects and jobs to identify preferred activities and skills. 

Determine whether your core values and skills are addressed through your current career. 

Brainstorm ideas for career alternatives by researching career options, and discussing your core values and skills with friends, family, and networking contacts. 

If you’re having difficulty coming up with ideas, consider meeting with a career counselor for professional advice.

In this ever-changing marketplace, chances are you’ll never feel 100% prepared. 

If your next step is unclear, the best way to find clarity is to move forward. Your view of the situation and potential solutions will be clearer when you're in the middle of it rather than when you’re on the outside looking in.

Pay attention to those activities that feel scary - they're usually your next stretch goal waiting to be tackled.

You might make mistakes, but your other option is to do nothing and remain stagnant.

A person with a foundation of knowledge and skills will make more money and most likely live a more meaningful life.
There’s a similar belief in start-ups: technology companies focus on learning over profitability in the early years to maximize revenue in the later years.

Prioritize plans that offer the best chance at learning about yourself and the world. Ask yourself, “Which plan offers the most learning potential?”

Any entrepreneur (and any expert on cognition / learning) will tell you that practical knowledge is best developed by doing, not just thinking or planning.

For careers, too, you don’t know what the best plan is until you try. 

• Research What's In Demand. Your first stop should be the boards and company websites that post the jobs you're interested in.
• Beef Up Your Resume. Don't neglect the experience you already bring to the table. Soft skills you may have learned (management skills, organizational skills, etc) may be a huge benefit, so don't write them off completely. 
• Go Back to School to pick up those new languages, skills, and techniques required to be competitive in your chosen field. 
• Build Your Network. Get acquainted not just with the people you want to emulate, but other people who are doing what you do now.

• Use Your Skills for Personal or Pet Projects.
• Intern or Volunteer.
• Freelance or Start a Side Gig.

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. 

Time. A typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all your non-career hours.

Impact. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

Identity. We tell people about our careers by telling them what we are.

• Analyze your current skill set, training level, and accomplishments to date. 
• Write down the aspects of the work you liked and what tasks or things you disliked. 
• Explore different career options. Investigate new fields, industries and potential careers. 
• Interview individuals who work at those types of jobs, or in fields of interest to you. 
• Look at growth opportunities, salaries, benefits, education level and then determine the job title to target.

• Use your transferable skills. You have acquired abilities from previous positions.
• Use your strengths. Incorporate your talents into any position you choose to go after.
• Get new skills. Study the industry you want to enter. Take some courses so you can more quickly enter the field.
• Many people prevent their own success. They find excuses, or blame others, for their own failures or mistakes instead of learning and improving from them.