Maybe your typical path is five years in patrol followed by five years in investigative work. Possibly the timetable is eight to 10 years of work experience before moving from architect to senior architect. Whether you want to head for technical or managerial destinations, you might find that the stations along the way are help desk specialist, desktop specialist, network administrator and network engineer before you can move further upward. In some cases, your employer's human resource staff or co-workers will be able to fill you in. But corporate career centers are not widely available, so chances are you'll have to seek out the bases to land on.
Professional organizations are logical resources.
Most now operate thriving Web sites where you can hook up with people in your field who have some of the information you'll need. Once you've blocked out a big-picture plan, follow up with alternative ideas of what you'd do if obstacles develop. In this follow-up, anticipate what you'd do in good times and bad. In earlier decades, when you could stay with a company for life, it was much easier to make career plans with certainty. You knew you'd be a worker bee for a given number of years, then a manager, than a director, then a vice president and so on.