Ai FMThe consulting psychologist supervisor, Ms. Lee Li Li, shares about the topic “Importance on Teen Career Planning” at 10:00a.m. at Ai FM (Live) on 11th April 2017 (Tuesday).
Ai FM Live: Importance on Teen Career Planning
Ms. Lee Li Li the psychologist, shares about the concept “Career Planning”
  • Career planning is neither to determine the direction of our future career direction nor the choices of education pathway.
  • It is a planning for our whole life.
Ways to plan for our life
Ways to plan for our life
  • Make plans based on three main elements: Personality traits, values of life and expertise
1. Personality Traits
  • It is important to understand who you truly are to determine a suitable career path. By asking question like “What kind of person am I?” it provides self-reflection and allows you to understand your true self. Teenagers could also approach the people around them (e.g. parents, family, friends, neighbours, etc.) asking them a similar question to help them further understand who they are and how others perceived them.
  • Gathers the information from the people around them and continued to explore this question further.
  • The answers towards this question does not necessarily takes one or two days. The teenagers may take as long as he/she could to reflect, till he/she finally decided which career path he/she is going to take.
Values and expertise2. Values and expertise
  • Self-reflection on the question “what kind of person would I want to be in the future? Similarly, teenagers may also ask people around them to know further about the values of his/her career and lifestyle
Ways for teenagers to experience the nature and characteristic of diverse careers
  • Through experiential observation.
  • Real life observation at the workplace to observe their work operating mode and lifestyles.
  • Understand a career’s value through reading books, newspapers, magazines, etc. to gain knowledge of the industry and the lifestyle of this career.
Why do more than career planning?
  • If to only plan for our career pathway, there are many assessment tests available to help accurately determine the expertise you possess and match its compatibility towards an industry, which could help developing a career path.
  • Most importantly it is essential to plan and manager our life. For example, how am I going to live my life after I graduated? What do I want to do after that?
  • Therefore, we mostly will based our career and choice of course as our starting point to plan for our lives.
Why it is essential for us to plan for our live starting from our career?
  • Career occupies most of our time. We spend most of our time (eight to nine hours per day) working.
  • Therefore, the right career choice could lead us to feel happy and gain satisfaction from our career. The reason being we have achieved oneness between our inner self and our personality traits.
The accuracy and reliability of life planning
The accuracy and reliability of life planning
  • As accurate as it is, these results are suitable only to be used as a guidance because it is changeable. External factors such as finance, health, and interest could sway and influence the career path, hence, needing to modify the initial career path.
  • Although there is external factors that is out of our control when determining our future career path, we may still able to achieve our career and life goal through others ways.
Teenagers and life planning
  • Teenagers nowadays have no idea about what they want.
  • Do not know about their personality traits, values of life and expertise
  • Results in lacking of motivation, passion and enthusiasm to strive in their career
Ways to overcome company turnover rate after setting expectations on employees
Ways to overcome company turnover rate after setting expectations on employees
  • Incorporate life planning as part of corporate training.
  • Each departments of the company need different types of expertise. Employers may guide employee to explore their expertise, integrating their personality and values of life can aid in enhancing their potential.
Life planning and our initial goals
However, there are also times, where we feel demotivated, where we would just want to take a break and rest. This phenomenon is common and could also lead us to forget our initial spark towards our career, and feeling unappreciative towards the things we once loved doing.

Therefore, it is important to rekindle the spark to continue to be motivated and pursue our career goals. We can create small goals in our life to have continuous progression, or we could reflect back once in a while on the initial spark we have towards our career to continue to be motivated and appreciative towards it. It is alright if we need a break, to re-energize to get back on track; we just have to remember the initial spark that lead us to our goals.

We may also plan for a getaway which we can clear our mind and relax and help us to think for future after our mind is clear rather than planning for a getaway which is merely a pleasure and entertainment trip. Life planning stages
Life planning stages
Below 14 years old
  • Developing stage
  • Cultivate personality, traits and positive attitude
14 to 25 years old
  • Exploration stage
  • Build the foundation on career, relationship and life
25 to 44 years old
  • Establishing stage
  • Plans put into actions
  • Goals realization
45 to 64 years old
45 to 64 years old
  • Stablizing stage
  • Improve work quality
65 years old and above
  • Retirement stage
  • Quality of life is more important than work
Note: The above content was received from Ai FM on the topic “Importance on Teen Career Planning” on 11th April 2017 (Tuesday). For more details, please contact our administration office. We will have our psychologist to advice you further. Thank you.