You will produce a five-year career plan that pulls together the work from every module.
Look at what you have built over this course. A direction shortlist. A market sheet with a sourced salary range. A rebuilt CV and LinkedIn profile. A tracker, a bank of interview stories, a network map and notes from real conversations. If you are switching fields, a switch plan. Each piece is useful on its own. Right now they are probably spread across a laptop, a phone and a couple of cloud folders.
This project pulls them into one document: your five-year career plan. It is the thing you will open at every quarterly review, update when the evidence changes, and use to make decisions about courses, jobs and offers. Allow about an hour, plus ten minutes to present it.
Here is the brief. Write a five-year career plan that someone whose judgement you trust could read in ten minutes and understand where you are going, why, and what you are doing about it this year. It should draw on the work from every module, and it should be short enough that you will actually reread it. Aim for three to five pages, with the detail concentrated in year one.
Open with your chosen direction, written as a role in a field, and a short paragraph on why it passed the three-circle test from lesson 1.1, Skills, interests and market: the three-circle test. Name the skills you bring, the evidence for your interest and what the market looks like. Then add what your informational conversations in module 7 changed. Say which directions you dropped, and why.
Wei Ling's opening: "Direction: supply chain data analyst, then analytics lead. Skills: five years of logistics operations, Excel modelling, vendor negotiation, now SQL. Interest: the late-deliveries dashboard and SQL project were the most absorbing work I've done. Market: steady mid-level demand across logistics, retail and e-commerce. Dropped procurement because of low interest."
Add your market sheet from lesson 2.4, Build a market sheet for your target role, or a short summary of it: the low, typical and high salary figures with their sources, the top skills with counts, and the main employers with the level they hire at. Mark the date it was last updated.
Then add your target employers, the ten from your market sheet, with the route you will use for each from module 5. Put the ones where you have a referral or a recruiter relationship at the top.
This is the heart of the plan. Start with your year-five description from lesson 9.1, Work back from where you want to be, then year three, then year one.
Break year one into four quarters, each with one to three milestones from lesson 9.2, Milestones you can check, mixing skill, experience and network milestones so that every quarter moves more than one of them forward. Every milestone needs a date and a way to check it.
Here is Wei Ling's year one, in brief. Quarter one: finish the SQL course and publish the portfolio project. Quarter two: hold four informational conversations and send five tailored applications for analyst roles. Quarter three: be in an analyst role, or have led the dashboard rollout to all three depots in her current job as a fallback that still builds evidence. Quarter four: re-run the market sheet and build a second portfolio project with a dashboard tool.
Years two to five can be a paragraph each. Let them get rougher the further out they go.
Add your network list from module 7, or the part of it most relevant to your direction, with last-contact dates. If you are switching fields, add your switch plan from lesson 8.4, Plan your switch: route, programme, application date, transition budget and checkpoint.
Finish with your four quarterly review dates from lesson 9.3, Review every quarter, the date of your yearly market sheet refresh and a note of where your wins log lives, so that future you can find it in a hurry.
Finally, present your plan in ten minutes to someone whose judgement you trust: a mentor, a former manager, a friend who knows the field or the person you told about your milestones in lesson 9.2. Presenting it aloud forces you to explain your reasoning, and gaps that hide in a document often show up the moment you have to say them out loud.
Ask them three questions afterwards. What is the weakest part of the plan? What would you do differently in year one? What am I not seeing? Listen without defending, as lesson 7.4 of Communicate at work: writing, speaking and meetings, Take criticism without defending yourself, describes, then decide which points to act on and update the plan.
When Arjun presented his plan to Marcus, the bank training lead, Marcus pointed out that his year one depended entirely on getting hired by December, with no fallback. Arjun added one: if no role by December, take on a part-time training project for a community organisation to keep building evidence while he kept applying.
A finished plan opens with a direction and the reason it passed the test, includes a dated market sheet and target employers, sets out year one in quarters with checkable milestones and later years in rougher terms, holds your network list, switch plan if you have one and four review dates, and has been presented to one person whose feedback you have acted on. Put yours together in the activity, then book the ten minutes with your chosen reader.
Complete the five-year plan template and present it in ten minutes to someone whose judgement you trust.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).