Creating a Career Plan

Why career planning matters

Most careers don't run on rails. The average Australian holds many different jobs over their working life, often crossing two or three different industries, and the working life itself now runs longer than it ever has — well into the late sixties for most professionals. That's a lot of decisions about what to take on, what to step away from, what to learn, and what to optimise for at any given moment.

A career plan isn't a five-year roadmap that locks you in. It's a document — written down, even briefly — that captures your working hypothesis about what you want and how you intend to get there. The act of writing it down forces clarity. It surfaces assumptions you didn't know you were making. It gives you something to revise as you learn. And, when an unexpected opportunity arrives, it gives you a basis to decide whether the opportunity is on-thesis or off-thesis — rather than reacting in the moment.

Career planning is most useful at exactly the moments people skip it: when you're in a stable role and "don't need to," when you're early enough that "you'll figure it out later," or when you're senior enough that "you've already arrived." All three are mistakes. Stable roles are where you build optionality for the move you'll need in three years. Early careers benefit most from the discipline of articulating values before you've absorbed your manager's. Senior careers need plans because the opportunities at that level are scarcer, more bespoke, and harder to compare without a framework.

It's never too late

Whether you're finishing school, completing a degree, returning from caring responsibilities, recovering from a redundancy, or twenty years into the same job — it's not too late to plan where you want to go and take steps to make a change. The framework is the same; only the inputs and the time horizons differ.

If anything, the people who benefit most from career planning aren't the early-career graduates the model was originally designed for. They're mid-career professionals at decision points — managers wondering whether to step up, specialists deciding whether to broaden, parents returning after a break trying to recalibrate, executives weighing when to leave a long-tenure role. Those are the moments where a written plan does the most work.

The SOAR framework

The most useful framework we've found for thinking through a career plan is SOAR, developed by Arti Kumar at the University of Bedfordshire and published by Routledge in 2007. It was designed for higher-education career planning but works just as well for established professionals and career-switchers. SOAR stands for Self, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results — and the four work together rather than in sequence.

The four elements aren't strictly sequential. Most people end up moving between them — a clearer sense of Self refines the Aspirations; new Opportunities reveal aspects of Self you hadn't articulated; the Results layer surfaces what you actually value when you have to choose. The SOAR diagram in Kumar's original book is drawn as a flow with feedback loops between the four, not a linear pipeline.

Seven structuring questions

Once you have the SOAR scaffolding in mind, the actual work is answering a small set of structured questions about yourself. Sit with these for thirty minutes; write the answers down; come back to them in a week and revise.

The seventh question is the most important and the most skipped. SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound — are well-trodden, but they exist because vague intentions don't translate into action. "I'll become a better manager" is an aspiration. "I'll complete the AGSM Senior Leadership Program by November and run two stakeholder workshops by end of Q3" is a plan.

A worked example

Here's how a senior manager — call her Sarah, mid-thirties, working at a state government agency — might use the SOAR framework to think through a career pivot. Anonymised but representative of conversations we have with clients regularly.

Notice what this plan does. Self isn't aspirational — it names actual strengths backed by track record, and a real values constraint. Opportunities are specific (named firms, named roles, named people) rather than abstract. Aspirations are bounded — both by what she wants and by what she won't sacrifice. Results are concrete actions with deadlines. The plan can be revised in three months when the inputs change. It's a working document, not a manifesto.

The 2026 considerations

The original version of this article was written during the pandemic. The world has moved on. Three things specific to the 2026 Australian career environment now belong in any plan:

• AI is reshaping job categories. Some roles are being automated entirely (early-career analyst work, basic copywriting, first-pass legal review). Others are being augmented (senior analyst work, design, project management — roles where AI is now a leverage tool). Others are emerging (AI safety, model evaluation, human-AI workflow design). Career plans drafted in 2021 didn't have to think about this. Plans drafted now should — particularly about which of your capabilities are AI-substitutable and which are AI-complementary.
• Skills-based hiring is rising. Many large Australian employers — including parts of the APS — are moving away from rigid job-title progression toward capability portfolios. This rewards people who have built deep capabilities across multiple roles, and penalises people whose career story reads as a linear ascent of identical job titles. Career plans should now include a deliberate capability development layer alongside the role-progression layer.
• The labour market has rebalanced. Australian unemployment sat at 4.3% in March 2026, and job ad volumes have declined year-over-year. The post-pandemic candidate-driven market is over. Application volumes per role are 5-10x what they were in 2022. Career plans now need to factor in that job-search itself takes longer and requires more relationship work than it did three years ago.

None of these change the SOAR framework. They change the inputs. A 2026 plan still asks the same four questions Kumar's framework asks; it just answers them with different facts on the ground.

Tools and resources

Several tools genuinely help with the Self and Opportunities work. Some external, some ours.

Reviewing your plan

A career plan is most useful when it's revised regularly. The cadence we suggest:

• Quarterly: review the Results layer. Did the 90-day actions happen? What did you learn? Set the next 90-day actions.
• Annually: review the Aspirations and Opportunities. Has anything changed about what you want, or about what's available? Often these shift faster than people notice — annual review surfaces the drift.
• Every 3-5 years, or at deliberate pivot points: review the Self layer. Strengths develop, values clarify with experience, working styles can evolve as you take on different responsibilities. The Self work isn't static; it's just slower-moving than the others.

The single most common reason career plans fail isn't the framework. It's that people draft them once, file them away, and never look at them again. The plan does its work in the revision, not in the original drafting.

A closing note

Most successful careers — the ones that look intentional in retrospect — were less planned than they appear. What the people running them had wasn't a five-year roadmap; it was a working hypothesis they revised regularly, a clear sense of what they wouldn't sacrifice, and a habit of converting reflection into specific 90-day actions.

That's all a career plan is. Write yours down. Revise it when the inputs change. Use it to make better decisions in the moments when you have to decide quickly. The future will surprise you anyway — but the surprises tend to land more usefully on a base of work you've already done than on a blank page.

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