Making your plan and putting it into action: Part 13 How to make your career plan

People often come to us saying they want ‘the right career’ for them. The implication is that they’re aiming to find something they can do for the rest of their life.

The problem is that, as we’ve seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change.

• You’ll change — more than you think
• The world will change — entire industries might not even exist in 20 years
• You’ll learn more about your personal fit — because it’s hard to predict what you’re going to be good at ahead of time.

In a sense, there is no stable ‘right career for you.’ Rather, the best option will keep changing from one year to the next. Many people we’ve advised would never have predicted they’d end up doing the job they did (myself included).

In fact, long-term planning can even be counterproductive. There’s a risk of becoming fixated on a specific path and failing to change course as your situation evolves.

That said, as we’ll see, giving up on planning and goal-setting probably isn’t wise either. “Plans are useless but planning is essential” is a cliché for a reason.

This is the planning puzzle: most ‘plans’ will radically change long before they’re completed, but we still benefit from having them. Given all this, how should you make a good career plan? Here are our main tips.

Reading time: 15 minutes. Or use our planning template to make your own plan.

1. Pick one of these three career stages

A common way to try and deal with all the uncertainty in career planning is to “keep your options open.” This usually means doing something generically prestigious (like consulting) that will allow you to enter other paths, while hoping to figure out what you want to do later.

This approach can easily become an excuse to avoid thinking deeply about what would be best for you. That, in turn, leads to gaining generic, middle-of-the-road career capital, when instead you could have advanced faster towards something much better. And we’ve seen the many biases that push people to adopt these kinds of options and then linger in them for too long.

Instead, take a step back and think about what your top priority should be given where you are in your career journey. Then, ambitiously pursue that priority. We divide careers into three main stages, each corresponding to a different priority:

1. Explore: If you’re deeply unsure what you want to do, rather than trying to “keep your options open,” try to figure it out. Learn about and test promising longer-term paths until you feel ready to bet on one for a few years. This stage is most common for people aged 18–24, but an older person who wants to change track might move back into exploration mode for one to two years. How long you should stay here depends on your time horizon and degree of uncertainty, but don’t stay until you’re confident in what you want to do longer term. A reasonable guess is enough.

2. Build: Once you have some ideas about where you want to place your bets, your top priority becomes building the career capital that will most efficiently advance you down those paths (while ideally also giving you backup options). This is typically your focus for at least the first couple of years in a given path, since that’s when you gain career capital fastest. It’s most common to be in this stage from ages 24–34, but an older person might return to it if they’re switching fields, have found an amazing new way to advance, or are targeting a career with a high and late peak like politics.

3. Deploy: Use the career capital you’ve built to tackle pressing global problems and bargain for a job that meets your other personal criteria. This is most often the focus for people aged 34 and older, but a younger person could move to ‘deploy’ if they think they’ve found an unusually good opportunity, or have a very short time horizon.

Throughout the guide, we’ve used five factors to compare career options: exploration value, career capital, immediate impact, job satisfaction, and personal fit. All of these remain important throughout your career, but your career stage determines which are the highest-priority at each time.

If you’ve thought about your plans but remain extremely uncertain about them, and aren’t able to do more exploration, then an alternative strategy is to ‘build the best transferable career capital you can.’ This is also different from ‘keeping your options open’ because it means committing to something that builds great skills, connections, and credentials, rather than trying to avoid closing any doors. Instead of Deloitte, it could mean joining a startup, or doing something unorthodox you might excel at.

A useful case study comes from Megan Cansfield, who majored in Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, and then went to study at the Yenching Academy in Beijing. While there, a classmate suggested she take a look at 80,000 Hours, and after thinking about which problems seemed most pressing, and how she might be best placed to help with them, she decided she wanted to work on reducing risks at the intersection of AI and great power conflict.

She’d spent some time doing research in academia but felt that academic work in her field (international relations) was unlikely to be impactful. She decided to prioritise exploring alternative roles to find her fit, including roles in the US government, national security, policy development, multilateral organisations, and strategic planning.

2. Have a longer-term vision, but focus much more on your next step

Although your plans are likely to change, having some idea of where you’d like to end up can help you spot much better opportunities to advance. This is true for everyone, but it’s even more important if you want to have a positive impact. Many of the most impactful jobs require specialist career capital that you’re unlikely to get by accident, like connections in biosecurity, and getting to the top of many fields requires years of focused effort. (By way of contrast, if your goal is just to have a comfortable life, then building some marketable and transferable career capital is probably enough.)

This is why for most people we advise, we think it’s helpful to have at least a vague idea of where you’d like to end up. We call this your vision. It should be broad enough that it won’t constantly change, and broader than a specific job, but narrow enough to provide direction.

Your vision should normally include:

• The 1–5 global problems you’d most like to work on
• The 1–3 types of roles you’d most like to aim towards

These target roles will often be defined by a skill set such as ‘organisation builder’ or ‘communicator.’ Sometimes, you might want to make it more specific, replacing communicator with YouTuber or keynote speaker. Sometimes, it’ll just be a standard career path like becoming a lawyer.

Your vision could still be something you aim to reach in the next two to five years, especially if you’re older or have a shorter time horizon. If you have a longer horizon and are pursuing a path where career capital compounds for a long time, then it might make sense for your vision to lie far ahead, much as an undergraduate named Bill Clinton was (maybe apocryphally) known to introduce himself as “the future president of the United States.”

Although your vision remains steadier than the specific jobs you’re pursuing, it’s still something you’ll update over time as you learn more. I like to check in on mine once every one or two years.

From here, we like to split most career decisions in two. There are decisions about vision and decisions about next steps. These are interrelated, but the division can be very clarifying.

A common mistake with visions is to obsess about which path seems best in the abstract. There’s so much variation between jobs within a path that getting down to concrete opportunities typically clarifies things greatly.

Ultimately, the decision you need to make is what to do next, and thinking about your vision is only useful insofar as it helps you figure out that next step. Usually, a broad best-guess direction will be enough and the majority of your time should be spent searching for and comparing concrete next steps. (After exploring next steps, you may also find you need to revise your vision — career planning often proceeds in rounds.)

Typically, your next step will be something you do for one to three years, but it could be anything from a few months to over five years, whether that’s attending a summer school, accepting a job, or founding a new organisation.

If you’re extremely uncertain, you can skip having a vision entirely to focus purely on next steps. If each step gains you some career capital, teaches you more about what fits, and allows you to have a little more impact, then you can build a great career over time, even if you have no idea where it’ll all lead. If you’re struggling with your vision, hopefully this offers a little relief.

But how do you figure out your next steps? There are two broad approaches, working backwards and working forwards.

Working backwards

If you have a vision, try to figure out the fastest route to get there. As we’ve seen, the best way to do this is by asking people in the field how someone with your background can best advance. Ask: ‘if I wanted to be in role X in five years, what steps would I need to take?’ Or, ‘if I wanted to become great at skill Y, how could I do that fastest?’ Also, look out for examples of people who themselves advanced unusually quickly and figure out how they did it. You can also step back even further — if your ultimate goal is to find something fulfilling that tackles the world’s most pressing problems, what could you do right now that would get you closest to that?

Otherwise, make a list of the career capital you’d need to realise your vision, and think about how to get each element. Whatever you think of his politics, Clinton was good at career planning. He knew he’d need to know a lot of people to succeed, so as an undergraduate, he started to keep a list of everyone he’d met.

Another option is to try to falsify your vision. The faster you can remove options that aren’t actually a good fit, the faster you can focus on the vision that is. Is there a next step you could take that would decisively tell you whether your vision makes sense? For example, if you want to become a biotech researcher, you’ll likely need to do a PhD. Applying to grad school can relatively quickly tell you how realistic that’s going to be.

Working forwards

Most great careers are not fully planned out in advance. Rather, they involve a bit of opportunism, following your nose, and doubling down on what’s working. They often involve unexpected twists and turns.

Partly, this is because our lives are inherently unpredictable. But it’s also because specific opportunities vary so much, even within the same path. You might think pandemic policy is more pressing than nuclear risk policy on average — but if you find a job in nuclear policy with an unusual amount of responsibility, or with a great mentor, that might trump the average difference. It’ll be better to pivot into nuclear policy, even if it doesn’t fit your preexisting vision.

Working forwards involves staying alert to fields that are rapidly growing, attracting talented people, or have natural momentum. As noted earlier, that’s how you increase your chances of getting lucky. Are there any opportunities that seem especially unusual or exciting — open doors that might not be around in the future? Is there anything you’re doing right now that’s going better than expected? Could you spend more of your time on that?

Ask your friends, colleagues, people working on pressing problems, and people you admire about interesting opportunities, since the best opportunities often come through connections. Look not only for impactful opportunities but also the environments that will maximise your rate of learning.

Megan decided her vision, if all went well, was to become an expert in multilateral relations and then advise key players on international agreements around AI. Working backwards to find her next step, she reviewed common entry routes into government and policy, like interning at a think tank and fellowships.

She also realised her current position, living and studying in China, could open up some less conventional options. She saw an advert for a job working for the US Embassy in Beijing with the US Department of State as a Chinese social media analyst — and got it. This turned out to be her entry point into a policy career, as we’ll see later.

3. Make an ABZ plan, including a backup option

Startup founders have a broad vision for the company they want to build, but they face enormous uncertainties when it comes to the finer details of their product and strategy. To overcome this, they test lots of approaches and ‘iterate’ towards the best product.

You face similarly large uncertainties in your career, so why don’t we borrow some of these entrepreneurial strategies and apply them? This is the premise of The Startup of You, a book by the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. One of his recommendations is making an ‘A/B/Z plan.’ It’s a way to help you write your plan while acknowledging the uncertainty that’s involved.

Plan A: your ideal scenario

Your Plan A is your guess at the best route to fulfilling your vision. Or, if you’re still in the exploration phase, then your Plan A could be to test out several longer-term paths.

Megan’s Plan A was to try and become an expert in multilateral relations, and then advise key players on AI treaties by working her way up in the US government, ideally by joining a DC policy think tank or international affairs publication.

Plan B: nearby alternatives

If your Plan A doesn’t work out, what would you do instead? Clarifying this ahead of time makes it easier to adapt and helps you spot alternatives you might have missed.

Megan’s Plan B was to work at a strategic consulting firm focused on China or Asia, or look for other jobs in national security or the public sector. These were less aligned with her values and fit but had a wider range of jobs available.

Plan Z: if all goes wrong, this is your temporary fallback

If neither your Plan A nor your Plan B work out, this is what you’ll do to pay the bills until you get back on your feet.

Having a Plan Z not only helps you avoid unacceptable personal outcomes, but knowing you’ll ultimately be OK makes it easier to take risks and be ambitious.

If you’re comfortable with the risks you’re taking, or are in a secure position, your Plan Z can be very short. If you’re in a higher-stakes situation, supporting dependents for example, you might want to plan it more carefully.

Some common examples might include sleeping on a friend’s sofa while working at a cafe to pay the bills. You could make a pact with a close friend to offer them the same should the need arise. People also live off savings, go back to a previous job, move back in with their family, or take a new job they’ll find relatively undemanding. Some people’s Plan Zs are even adventurous, things like going to teach English in Asia — a surprisingly in-demand, uncompetitive job that lets you learn about a new culture.

Whatever your Plan Z is, ask yourself: ‘is this acceptable to me?’ If not, you might need to revise your Plan A to prioritise building your safety net for a while, so you’ll be in a better position to take risks in the future.

Megan’s Plan Z was to go back into the corporate intelligence and investigations field where she had prior experience, and that tends to thrive during recessions, providing a backup in a poor job market.

In 2024, she advised the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency on how to work with other countries and NGOs on improving global infrastructure security. In 2025, she landed a fellowship at the Centre for the Governance of AI, one of the world’s leading think tanks on the topic.

4. Set a review point

Explicitly planning to update your plan means you’re getting ready for changes that are likely to happen, rather than getting stuck on a default path. You can set a review point by picking a timeframe, typically 6–24 months, when you’ll review your plan. Around the new year or the start of autumn can be a nice time to do it.

Another option is to figure out when you’re next going to gain important information about your plan and reassess at that point. For example, publishing lots of papers in top journals is key to advancing in academic careers. You could commit to reassessing whether you want to be an academic if you don’t publish a specified number of papers by a certain date.

In your review, the most important question to ask is: what have I learned since I last made a plan, and does that suggest I should make any changes? If you haven’t learned anything of significance, then probably you can stick with what you’re doing.

If in doubt, speak to someone else about it. Try to decide which part of your plan needs to change. Is it your vision or your next step? You can use the process in part 12 to compare your current path to some concrete alternatives. If the alternatives seem maybe better, it’s likely time to switch.

If you have the time, it’s helpful to start afresh: ask yourself, if I were making a new career plan today, what would it be?

Resolving the planning puzzle

How do you plan when all plans are almost certain to be wrong? Now we can see the value isn’t in having a plan that unfolds exactly as it was foretold, it’s in what you learn from the process of planning.

If you’re uncertain about what to do longer term, commit to exploring or building transferable career capital. This is different from drifting along trying to “keep your options open” because it involves actively learning and advancing.

Your vision is deliberately broad — focused on problems and skill sets rather than specific job titles — so it can survive even as specific opportunities change. Yet, it’s also narrow enough to help you spot the faster ways to advance. Then you focus intensely on finding the best next step. By taking a series of good steps, you can build a great career over time, even if it evolves in ways you didn’t initially expect.

Your ABZ plan acknowledges that there are always alternatives. Instead of feeling paralysed, you’ve already thought through what you’ll do if things don’t work out. By setting a review point, you’re not just allowing for change — you’re expecting it. The plan will change. But because you’ve planned for that, you’ll be ready.

Now it’s time to put your plan into action.

Read next:  Part 14: How to actually get a job

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