What Career is Right for Me?
by Robert J Renode IV
Posted on December 4, 2017 at 1:45 PM
There's about a dozen career paths, and within those there's dozens of fields, AND within those fields there's hundreds of jobs that pertan to that career path. With thousands of career options, what can you do to pick the correct one for you?
Understand Yourself
Understanding yourself is the first step in figureing out what career will be the right choice for you. Having an acurate grasp of your interest, core values, personality, and possibly most importantly is your aptitudes. These four things become so important for your future that you must comprehend them to their full extent.
Your aptitdues and why they are what they are is based on a variety of things, but I'm not here to explain this to you. Here's a video that covers this topic quite well. Benjamin Todd @ TEDx Talk >>
"To find work you love, don't follow your passion."
To begin to understand some of these, you can try taking some career tests to begin to get a basis of what traits your posses, what skills interest you, what works best for you personallity etc. It's a great way for a start, but the rest is up to you. Career tests only do so much and what you may need is a Career Counselor, or someone who specializes in helping others find their career paths.
Make a List Occupations to Explore
Once your understand yourself by either taking a career test, help from a career counselor, or some other method, you might have good amount of ideas you want to explore further. Write or type all of your ideas into one single list to keep them organized.
Start with placing possible career paths that fit you. Examples include education, business, communications and many more. From there branch off to types of jobs under those career paths. For instance under "Arts and Entertainment" there could be Boradcasting/Film and also Fashion/Texile Art or another possibility is multiple fields. Generally you'll want to stick within the paths and fields though sometimes it is logical to leave your field or even path for another useful path.
Further Explore Occupations
With your list complete of occupations that fit you, you'll want to start exploreing some of these possibilities. You'll want to begin by learning about the broad general field and path. Understanding you path and field can help you comprehend possible careers or jobs in your chosen field. Start by first exploring the career paths that interest you the least but you still have an ampitude for. You may find that once "boring" path now exciting, it could change the whole ball game.
While researching, or "exploring", you want to search for education, training/licensing requirements, and just the basic job description. Information on all of these can be found all throughout the internet. Government websites can give you market info on the field.
Short List
It's time to shorten your list to a resonable size. Begin by removing jobs and occupations that won't help you reach your life goals, have a bad outlook, or are just flat out boring to you. You also want to removed jobs that you won't want to fulfil the requeirements for. By this point you should now have no more than 5 to 6 jobs left on your list. This will lead to more research.
Depthen your Research
With these 5 to 6 jobs you're going to want to start doing even more indepth researchg. Begin arragning interviews with people that are currently in the field. Wether that be a realtive or friend, make it happen. With this insider look, you'll begin to understand exactly what your future may look like.
Ask to possibly shadow some of the occupations that interest you most. Shaowing on a job is when you basically follow someone around during their work they and watch them work. You can ask questions and maybe even do some of thge work yourself. It's a great learning experience, so even if you don't end up in that occupation, you'll have the extra kownledge.
Make your Choice
All of your research and time has gone into this moment. Choosing a career! You should've gathered enough information to make a firm decison on what you want your future to head into. Remeber that you cna change your career at anytime. A good amount of people change careers a few times troughout their life.
Source: "How to Choose a Career.” Career Key, https://www.careerkey.org/choose-a-career/how-to-choose-a-career.html.