HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR CAREER
KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF- Before choosing the right career, you must learn about yourself. Your values, interests, soft skills, and aptitudes, in combination with your personality type. Some people choose to work with a career counselor or other career development professionals who can help them navigate this process.
MAKE A LIST OF OCCUPATIONS YOU WANT TO EXPLORE- You probably have multiple lists of occupations in front of you at this point—
To keep yourself organized; you should combine them into one master list. And the choose one out of it which suits your compatibility, capability. They may be careers you know a bit about and want to explore further.
Also, include professions about which you don’t know much. You might learn something unexpected.
EXPLORE THE OCCUPATIONS ON YOUR LIST- At this point, you’ll be thrilled you managed to narrow your list down to only 10 options. Now you can get some basic information about each of the occupations on your list.
And get more information about it, gain knowledge about that occupation if you are interested to do it, it will help you to decide your career properly.
CREATE A “SHORT LIST”- Now you have more information, start to narrow down your list even further. Based on what you learned from your research so far, begin eliminating the careers you don’t want to pursue any further. You should end up with two to five occupations on your “short list.”
Remove everything with duties that don’t appeal to you. Get rid of any occupation if you are unable or unwilling to fulfill the educational or other requirements, or if you lack some of the soft skills necessary to succeed in it.
LEARN TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THAT OCCUPATION- When you have only a few occupations left on your list, start doing more in-depth research. Arrange to meet with people who work in the occupations in which you are interested. They can provide firsthand knowledge about the careers on your short list.
As they are experienced on that particular field, which is very fruitful for you to gain ample amount of information.
MAKE YOUR CAREER CHOICE- Finally, after doing all your research, you are probably ready to make your choice. Pick the occupation that you think will bring you the most satisfaction based on all the information you have gathered.
Realize that you are allowed do-overs if you change your mind about your choice at any point in your life. Many people change their career at least a few times, it should be flexible enough for you to change it.
WRITE A CAREER ACTION PLAN- A career action plan should be a written document that lays out all the steps you will have to take to reach your goals.
Think of it as a road map that will take you from point A to B, then to C and D.
Write down all your short- and long-term goals and the steps you will have to take to reach each one.
Include any barriers that could get in the way of achieving your goals and the ways you can overcome them.
This may sound like a lot of work and it is.
But it’s much easier to forge a career path when you know what you want.
Taking these steps early will save you a lot of struggle and uncertainty in the long run.
