What is career planning? How to understand the profound meaning of career planning more easily?

Although the concept of career planning is not well known in China, it has a history of one hundred years. This concept originated in the field of career counseling in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, which refers to helping individuals to choose careers, get ready for employment and enter their favorite and good careers through information giving. Later, with the change of individual view and development view, as well as the development of psychological counseling and psychotherapy, researchers proposed that career counseling should pay attention to individual psychological characteristics and psychological process, rather than just focusing on the external performance of behavior and providing information, and advocated that career counseling should be viewed from the perspective of lifelong development, not limited to the static career choice at a single point in time, but should be investigated in the overall framework of human development. These viewpoints promote the emergence of the concepts of "career" and "career counseling".

As far as life is concerned, the range of concern ranges from kindergarten to retirement and even death, that is, all stages of a person's life; Horizontally, its scope is not limited to career choices and activities, but covers all aspects of individual life. Career counseling also completely transcends career counseling, and emphasizes consulting individuals from different angles such as the development of career decision-making ability, the development of self-concept, the different characteristics of individuals, and the adaptation to external changes. At present, researchers generally agree that "career planning is a process in which a person tries his best to plan his future career development, and makes appropriate arrangements under the premise of considering his intelligence, sexual orientation, value, resistance and assistance, so as to adjust and straighten his position in life and strive for a proper position for himself".

From the evolution of the concept of career planning, it can be seen that people's understanding of career planning has gone through a process from focusing on simple planning of people and things to focusing on people's internal psychological characteristics and processes, as well as the internal mechanism of interaction between people and the environment; From paying attention to individual activities in a single time period to paying attention to individual lifelong development; The process from focusing on a single event in life to focusing on all events in life that unite various roles. This research process from the outside to the inside, from point to surface, from static to dynamic is a process in which career planning gradually enters the field of mental health, and it is also a process in which the concept of career planning is increasingly consistent with the contemporary concept of mental health. At the same time, the concept of career planning has gradually formed an interdependent relationship with mental health during its evolution.

As a dynamic process that reflects people's initiative and creativity, career planning has become a plan, blueprint and action policy to achieve mental health. As a relatively stable psychological state, mental health is the basis and guarantee for individuals to make appropriate career planning. Individuals achieve mental health in the process of career planning, which in turn affects the whole career planning process. The two constitute a cycle, which are mutually integrated, interdependent and mutually promoted in individuals.