Planning & Organising 

It is exactly the same in the world of work, where planning and organisational skills are ranked in the top ten most desirable employability skills.

What is planning?
Planning is a process which helps you to focus your ideas and decide on the steps you need to take, in order to achieve a particular goal. Planning is vital at all levels in the work place.

• You need to plan your own tasks and time
• Your manager will need to plan the tasks and time required of your department
• Senior management will need to plan the goals and aims of the company as a whole

As the saying goes, ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’.

Why do employers want planning and organisational skills?
Employers need you to have planning skills because they need to be able to let you break down the tasks they give you into manageable chunks. A project for example that is supposed to take a year to complete, becomes much more achievable if you have a target to achieve every three months.

Being able to organise a task is vital at all levels of employment. The better your ability to plan and organise, the more likely you are to be hired.

How can you show you have them?
An effective plan should give you a set timetable and a set of clearly defined goals that are achievable. You can show your planning abilities at interview in many ways, including:

• Planning an essay or piece of writing
• Explaining how you organised a meeting or event
• If you have been on a gap year, detailing the planning that went into organising your trip
• How you achieved a goal in a part-time job or previous roles

How is planning used in the world of work?
Planning is used at all levels in the workplace, from how you break up your day-to-day tasks to the aims of the company on a yearly basis.

Organisational skills are used to ensure that the right people with the right skills end up working on the projects that best suit them and the needs of the company.