Finding the Right Career

When choosing the right career, you need to follow a certain process in order to help you reach a decision. Some people find that they know exactly what career they want to pursue but they never attain their goals because they haven’t come up with a structured plan to help them to achieve it.

Then there are others who only have a vague notion of what they’d like to do for a living and some even have no idea. However, by following the same process, it can help you to narrow down your options and help you to focus.

Assessing Yourself

Before you start thinking about a possible career, you should first begin by undertaking a thorough and realistic evaluation of yourself. This stage of your career planning should include making a list of the following:

• Your skills and personal qualities
• Your qualifications Your interests
• Your values
• The preferred environment in which you’d prefer to work – for example, outdoors, in an office, in a factory
• Your views about training and development and career advancement possibilities

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Assessing Your Options

Once you’ve completed a self-assessment, you should start to see a clearer picture emerging of the types of career you could be cut out for and those which you feel wouldn’t suit you. The next stage is to draw up a list of possible occupations and industries in which your self-assessment results would seem to fit.

As you identify each occupation, research the industries and ask yourself how each of them might be right for you. You’re likely to find that in doing your self assessment that some of the values you hold contradict the values commonly held within a particular industry or things that you’re interested in would require further qualifications.

Perhaps certain occupations might not be suitable as you‘re looking to find a career with better earnings potential. Maybe you’ll discover that certain industries are too competitive for your personality or that they don’t hold much in the way of career prospects or growth.

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Decision Making

By undertaking the procedures outlined above, you’ll develop a comprehensive view as to the types of careers you could see yourself in and you should be able to narrow your choices down to a handful. At this stage, if you’re still unsure, it’s a good idea to seek career advice from a careers specialist who will be able to discuss your options with you and who can clarify anything you’re unsure of.

Things like further education can be discussed as well as looking at the practicalities of whether a certain option is going to be realistic or even whether or not it’s a financially viable for you. You may even wish to write to some companies in your chosen fields and ask them if they could perhaps arrange for you to go into a company and shadow a particular employee for a day or two. This is often a useful way of finally selecting options and eliminating others.

By seeing a job performed ‘at the sharp end’ so to speak and within its own environment, it can truly open your eyes and mind up to the realities of the job which can help you to decide if a specific career is right for you or not based upon your original self assessment.

Taking Action

After all of this, you should now be able to formulate a plan. It might either be considering a suitable academic or vocational training course or it may be finding a job if you’re already qualified to enter a particular profession. If it’s further education that’s needed, then as well as identifying suitable courses, you may also need to consider financial implications and other commitments such as a family you have to support.

If looking for a job, then in addition to pursuing specific job advertisements, you’ll also need to spend time tailoring your CV to a particular role you have in mind and make speculative applications to relevant companies which will require further research. You’ll need to know how to write effective cover letters and learn about things like how to complete an application form and make it stand out as well as learning how to prepare for job interviews. A career guidance specialist can help you with this and with other aspects of your career planning.

Like all good things in life, finding the right career often takes time and can involve a lot of patience, hard work and sacrifice but when you think about how much time you’re going to spend at work over the course of your daily life, then the initial hard work you’ll have put in at the beginning should serve you well for many years to come.

The Next Step

Now that you have read through the advice above, you might want to put it into practice. Our CV Builder lets you build a professionally structured CV tailored to your target role. Enter your details and experience, and get a polished CV ready to send to employers. Try it now →