[A] If you choose a career that does not fit you, you can start over.[B] Career planning overweighs any other factors.[C] Review your plans and progress periodically with another person.[D] Serious flaws in the ways many people make career decision.[E] Study yourself.[F] Set up some predictions about yourself in a career.[G] Write your career goals down.Career planning helps you to shape your career possibilities. It does not necessarily follow routine or logical steps. Each of us places weight on different factors and may consider certain phases of career planning at different times. Career planning includes gathering information about ourselves and about occupations, estimating the probable outcomes of various courses of action, and finally, choosing alternatives that we find attractive and feasible. Quite often career planning helps people to see the kinds of assistance they need to do what they want and helps direct them to available resources.(41)__________This is the key to career planning. Understanding what you are like, what you value, and what you want to become is the foundation for all career planning. To have a better insight into yourself, you are supposed to examine your strengths and weaknesses, your goals, and the trends in your personal development. The self-understanding that you gain enables you to imagine how certain occupations may best fit your personality, interests, abilities, and goals. All career decisions require us to learn both about ourselves and about work, and to integrate these two kinds of knowledge.(42)__________A technique useful for organizing ideas about your career development is to actually put them down by time blocks in your life, for example, ages nineteen to twenty-two, twenty-three to thirty... This action forces you to crystallize your thinking and to reorganize fuzzy and half-formed ideas. It may lead to new insights about your possibilities and may help you to see new relationships, patterns and trends, or to identify gaps in your thinking about your career development.(43)__________Consider the kind of person you are, what you’re likely to be like, what changes are likely to take place in an occupation, what basic problems you might meet, and what you need to solve your problems. These hypotheses, or educated guesses, should represent your understanding of yourself at present, what you can do, and what you will do.(44)__________Every so often, take stock of your situation and consider what steps have to be taken next. Taking inventory of progress and planning further steps can help you cope with the changes that you undergo and the changes that take place in the labor market. Talking over your plans with a college counselor, your parents, and your friends helps you define your goals and improve your career plan or make them work.(45)__________Today, growing numbers of people are changing careers or getting second start in careers that have greater appeal to them. Society no longer attaches the stigma of "instability" to the idea of career hopping, as it once did. Motives or reasons for changing career vary widely, but many people move because they feel stale or fed up with a grinding or dull routine. For some, a second start grows out of the realization that what they want out of life is not what they are doing, and they decide to do those things they enjoy and believe to be important. Certainly, time spent in one occupation is likely to narrow the range of later occupation choices; very few people have the motivation and financial resource to start a completely new career in mid-life. Most people move to related field that involves a minimum of new training. 41