How to Plan your Career in Fashion

Plans, in general for anything in life, serve not only to stay focused on goals but to make them more concrete. Whatever you want to achieve in your life or in your career, whether it’s travelling to a special destination, attending a course, change job, moving to a new city, having a plan helps you achieve what you set, makes things clear and lets you consider what you didn’t think of. Obviously it is not enough to throw down a plan to make what you have written down happen, you have to take some actions every day that take you towards your goal.

Planning can obviously be applied to one’s career. It is important to set goals, be ambitious and always want to get the most and always more. Having a plan from the beginning will also help you answer one of the most frequent job interview questions: “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

Whether you are about to graduate or you want to change the path of your career or you think there is something in your life that is not taking the direction you want, throwing down a plan will help you to be clearer about what you need to do.

If you have just left university, the first thing to do to plan your career is to start from the beginning. We have said many times what it takes to start working in fashion when you have no experience: internships.

If you are about to graduate at this time then the ideal is to plan your summer. A vacation week to celebrate your graduation is enough for your gratification, but it’s time to roll up your sleeves and prepare to enter the working world, so you have to plan not only your vacation but above all your first internship. Almost all the fashion companies offer many summer internships that last one to two months. These short periods of experience are very useful for enriching your CV, having your first real approach to the world of fashion from within and really understanding how it works and what you like. (PS do you need help with your CV? Check out our CV templates approved by fashion companies and create an oustanding CV in just 10 minutes using Microsoft Word).

When planning your career in fashion, there are several things you have to take into consideration: which companies would you like to work for: if fashion, beauty, agencies … which are the roles that interest you most, what are your current skills and experiences and those you want to acquire (if you want to become a Photoshop expert then your plan should include a PS course), what are your priorities (do you want to focus only on your career or even on your personal life?) and consider if you want to move to one of the fashion capitals. An experience abroad is very useful and is evaluated very positively on your resume, but moving to another cit, requires a detailed planification (you need to find an apartment, learn the language, understand how to move in the city …).

When you are planning your career in fashion, it might be useful to do some research on LinkedIn. Search for the people you admire for their career in fashion, and find out what their career path was to get to where they are today: they did two internships, an experience abroad, two years in the same company but in two different roles … Study the evolution of their careers. This will help you to understand how a career in fashion is often characterized by constant changes. Many times you need to change company or role in order to progress your career.

When planning your career in fashion, set growth as your primary goal: on average every 1-2 years, you should have a role advancement or change your responsibilities. If you start with an internship, after a year it might be time to jump on a junior role, and after a couple of years, it’s time for a new career change. If you are in the right company at the right time, you can grow within it, but as you will see from your research you will find that many people who work in fashion, move to another company and role on average every 3 years in order to grow professionally. When you feel that you can’t learn anything from that company and position, then it’s time to change.

Planning your career is a good way to get everything in place: make a list of things that are important to you and try to figure out how to mix them to reach them all.

For example, let’s say your priorities are the following:

• I want to live in New York
• I’d like to work in marketing
• I want my first child at 30
• I would like to travel for work
• I would like to buy my first home within my 30s

If these are your priorities then you could start looking for an internship in New York, work for a year, make a career change by looking for a junior marketing position in a company that requires many business trips for the first two years and then have a more fixed and stable role within the age of 30, when you want to have a child. In the meantime you have put money aside over the years to reach your goal of buying a home. If you are not planning, you may be at 29 years old with a job that does not allow you to have the stability needed to have a child and if you have not saved money during the previous years, you may not be able to buy a home within the next year.

It is important to write down what you want to get and divide your plans for months, years, weeks. Use a calendar or phone notes and make sure you look at these plans at least twice a week to make sure that everything you’re doing every day takes you in the direction you want. Don’t leave your plans there because otherwise, it will be easy to lose sight of your goals. Print them on the fridge, on your makeup mirror so that every day you will be motivated and focused on your goal.

Living the days without long-term goals, you could find one day asking yourself what’s going on in your life. Time is precious and unfortunately, we can’t go back, so if there is one thing you want, then make it happen. When developing your plans, don’t stress yourself too much trying to figure out what you would like in 6 years. If at this moment your desire is to work in fashion and have a child at 30, plan accordingly. We all change our minds all the time, you can always adjust your plans. There will always be unforeseen circumstances, just review the new priorities every time you feel that your goals are different. There is nothing wrong in realizing after a couple of years that you want to change your job. But planning will help you keep track of everything and achieve success.

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