Five characteristics of career planning

1 You understand your own strengths and weaknesses

This is the foundation. If you know what you do well, you are also likely to understand what you enjoy doing, which is important for the future. This is also the key to setting the priorities for your development plan and, critically, how to best sell yourself to a potential employer.

Do you understand enough about yourself and your personality both to capitalise on your strengths and to allow for your weaknesses? Can you define what you enjoy doing and want to do more in the future? Do you understand what motivates you, or how you personally would define success?



2 You are alive to changing models of leadership and what might be required in the future

Headship today is different from headship ten years ago. To plan for a headship of the future, therefore, you need to be alive to policy trends and changing patterns of leadership. It is possible that your dream job doesn't yet exist?

Roles that you might not have considered previously may now meet your career goals. As schools enter into federations and other collaborative arrangements, new models of school leadership are emerging that may provide new kinds of headships and new career opportunities. The extended schools agenda is opening the possibility of leadership roles across multi-professional organisations. To take advantage, you must be open to new possibilities.

3 You have a sense of your broad career goals and the standards you need to reach

You can't see into the future, but you can set goals as far as the horizon. If you can set goals, you can also define the standards you need to reach to help you achieve your goals.

Be practical: would you move for the right opportunity, or are you focusing your career within a particular geographical location? What financial reward do you require? Salary is rarely a prime motivator, but you also have practical commitments you must meet in order to function.

The National Standards for Headteachers give you an explicit target for your personal career planning, because they provide the generic framework that defines the knowledge, expertise and understanding that you will need as a head. To move forward you will need to assess your own practice against the standards.

4 You own your development plan to help you meet those standards

Your development plan is how you make progress through your career plan. There are development opportunities available at national, local and school level:

National level

NCSL offers development programmes for leaders at all levels. The Leadership Development Framework is designed to recognise the different skills, expertise and learning required at points in a school leader's career. All the development opportunities can be found at www.ncsl.org.uk/programmes.

Professional associations and other national and regional providers also offer a range of leadership development opportunities.

Local level

Most local authorities and dioceses support leadership development with locally developed and run programmes. Provision varies from one authority to another, and you will have to check what is available to you.

Remember, too, that leadership development and succession planning for headship are priorities nationally. These issues are high on the local authority and diocesan agendas, so if provision is limited locally, or does not meet your needs, you may be able to work with your headteacher and others to prompt your local authority to develop its support for aspiring leaders in the authority area.

School level

Effective development can take place just as easily at your own school level, ideally as a consequence of an effective approach to appraisal. Indeed, the performance management process gives you an excellent focus for school-based development activity, helping you to target effort to specific development outcomes.

5 You can communicate your proposition effectively in the recruitment market

In other words, you can convince other people that you can do what you say you can.