In Formulating a Career Strategy - Part 1, we covered the part of the strategy formulation process that has to do with defining exactly where you want to end up in life and what career you want to get you there.

In this part of the lesson, we’ll show you how to embark on the next leg of the journey, which includes determining your strengths, identifying your weaknesses, and putting a roadmap together in order to improve on your weaknesses and achieve the wealth and career success you desire for yourself.

Once you know exactly what direction you want to head in, the next step is finding out what you’re going to need to get there. If you’ve done your homework and found a career that fascinates and exhilarates you, you probably have a good idea of what you need to do to become whatever it is you want to become.

However, you shouldn’t aim for simply attaining your desired career choice. You should aim for being the absolute best at the career you’ve chosen for yourself. Here’s how you can do that.

Identify Your Strengths

In order to formulate a career strategy that will put you on the road to success, you should take an honest look at yourself and find out what skills you currently have that are applicable to the career you’ve chosen. These skills may be intellectual, physical, or emotional in nature.

If you’re having trouble identifying what specific skills are required for your desired career, a good place to start is by asking someone who is already in that line of work.

If you don’t know anyone personally, we would recommend either using a social networking site, such as LinkedIn, to establish a few contacts in the industry or posting a question on an online discussion forum (such as Yahoo! Answers) asking what skills and qualifications are necessary for landing a position like the one you want.

You should also think about what kind of experience you have that would come in handy or give you an edge in the career you’ve chosen. As cliche as it sounds, everyone is good at something.

It could be something you studied in school, something you accomplished at work, a hobby of yours that enhanced a skill needed for the career, or some other experience you had in your life that makes you suitable for the career.

Everyone has different experiences, so your perspective on whatever subject matter your chosen profession engages in should be unique. Think of ways that what you bring to the table is different from what everyone else brings.

In the end, you’ll probably find that you have some of the necessary skills for the career you’ve chosen, but not all of them.

Identify Your Weaknesses

If you assess yourself critically and honestly, you’ll probably also identify areas where your skills need improvement or are non-existent. No one is perfect, so everyone should be able to find something they can improve on.

Perhaps you don’t have the amount of experience normally required for the career. Perhaps you haven’t met the educational requirements needed to land a position in the industry. Both of these are common weaknesses, but neither of them are insurmountable.

The type of weaknesses you should pay special attention to are personality-based ones, since these are the hardest to overcome. For example, if success in the career you’ve chosen requires an agressive personality and you are very passive and don’t feel comfortable engaging in confrontation, this may be a warning sign that you’re not naturally predisposed to be in that line of work.

You can work extremely hard to change your personality (and it can be done), but it is going to be very difficult for you to overwrite your natural programming in favor of the personality traits desirable to the industry.

We recommend that you be honest with yourself when you’ve identified one of these, and choose your course of action based on whether you realistically think you can change your personality and whether you actually want to change it.

Another thing to note here is that you are also going to need to have confidence in the skills and abilities you have acquired thus far. If you currently aren’t confident with your abilities, it is probably due to one of two things.

Either your skills are not up to par, or you do possess the appropriate levels of the necessary skills, but you lack the confidence to acknowledge the fact that your skills are adequate.

In the first case, you should include your underdevelopment of these skills as weaknesses you need to improve on in order to gain an appropriate level of confidence in them.

In the second case, your self image is your weakness, and you need to work on improving it until you have the level of confidence in your abilities you’re going to need to sell your unique package of skills in the marketplace.

Create A Career Roadmap

After you’ve identified what your strengths are and what you need to work on, the next thing you should do is put together a plan of how you want to get from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. We call this your career roadmap.

Don’t get overwhelmed. You’re not writing this in stone. You’ll be able to change it if your circumstances change or you run into obstacles along the way.

Putting together a career roadmap is crucial to being able to plan for the future of your career because it does two key things for you.

First, it will keep you focused and remind you of what your career goals are. It keeps your eye on the prize.

Second, it will let you see how far you’ve come and how much progress you’ve made. It lets you know how you’re doing.

Your career roadmap should have two sections.

The first section should be a list of all your strengths and weaknesses. Beside each weakness, you should state how you’re going to improve on that weakness and then give it a target date. The target date is important because it forces you to think about the amount of effort it will take to improve each weakness to the level you want and how much time it will realistically take you to improve them.

In the second section of your career roadmap, you should list a series of actions you can take to lead you from where you are now to where you want to be career-wise. This should serve as a to-do list for advancing your career.

This list of steps should be put together without regard for how much each action will cost. People often avoid doing things that will improve their skills simply because they are expensive. We’ve already established in the personal finance toolbox lesson that your career is going to be the biggest investment you make in your life. How can you expect the value of this investment to grow if you don’t invest in it?

Strategy is part planning and part execution. Once you have completed your career roadmap, you’re done with the majority of the planning part. In Part 3 of this lesson, we’ll show you how to execute what you’ve planned and cover some things to remember along the way.

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