Post 2 of 4 in a series on Strategic Planning in Career Services
Career Threads is a micro-blog series that offers quick insights into trending topics in career services, jointly composed by the Consulting Team at The Career Leadership Collective, from their experiences interacting with hundreds of career professionals and senior campus leaders.
At the Career Leadership Collective, we like to describe strategic planning as a four-stage process. The steps of the process are as follows:
1. Collect Insights
It is best if you begin your strategic planning by collecting insights. You may examine the operations of your office and your institution as a whole. You may collect and analyze data from employees and students. You may interview various stakeholders to learn about how people perceive your office and its work. The goal of this stage is to gather information that will inform your strategic decisions.
2. Create Goals
After collecting information, your next step will be to set clear goals for your office. Setting goals will allow you to understand where your office is now, where you’d like it to be, and what the gap between those two looks like. Setting clear goals will help to guide you as you create strategies for growth and implement policies and initiatives.
3. Articulate Strategy
A well-crafted strategy provides a roadmap for how you can transform your office from the way it is now into what you’d like it to be in the future. Your strategies should help you to understand how best to allocate resources, which initiatives to prioritize, and how to navigate challenges as they come up.
4. Outline Tactics
Tactics are detailed, specific, and concrete ways by which your office will implement strategy. While strategy offers a big-picture roadmap to success, tactics are the day-to-day work that fits into those strategies. Tactical considerations might include action plans, assignment of responsibilities to individual staff, setting timelines, and ways of monitoring progress and outcomes.
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By following these four steps, you can ensure that your team has a plan to lead your career office to greater success and impact while minimizing wasted or misguided efforts. We realize each stage takes time, thought, and expertise.
The Career Leadership Collective regularly assists higher education with strategic planning across their career ecosystems. Stay in touch if we can assist your efforts!
See Post 1: The Importance of Strategic Planning
Access our: Toolkit on Strategic Planning for Career Centers
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