When you decide to take up a job, you are not prodigiously impacting your future opportunities; instead, you have found a way to earn your income but when you are establishing your career, you are forging your path for a lifetime.
But with such a large number of career options, how do you decide which will suit you the best? Choosing a career is not just selecting a source of income; it also implies that you prefer a job that will not exhaust you for the rest of your life.
On the contrary, a job that does not interest you will soon become tedious and burdensome, and you will be left waiting for the weekend for your entire life.
Deciding on a career path without any predetermined notions can be utterly frightening and may appear like an impossible task. Still, with proper direction on some basic steps to create structured planning, the task becomes manageable and straightforward.
Here are the 5 steps to decide the best career path for you –
1. Examine your personality.
What are you passionate about? Which activity spurs your interest? What are your strengths or what do you think is your innate talent? The first step is assessing yourself. You need to find out your strengths, weaknesses, and ambitions. You must have thorough knowledge about yourself – your talents and aptitudes, your drawbacks and shortcomings.
Consider taking a personality test to find out the answers to these questions. This will help you decipher your traits better which will, in turn, assist you in short-listing occupations that are great for your personality type.
2. Study your options.
When you have short-listed 15-20 options based on the criteria mentioned above, you need to acquire essential information about each of them. The next step is exploring the choices you have enumerated. This will help you get a better insight into the several options available and choose the best one for you.
You have to look into the degree, training, experience, and education required in various fields and learn about the probable advancement in each career. Keep eliminating all the jobs that do not have any prominent placement and growth. Cut off any positions in which you are inadequate in terms of educational requirements and training.
3. Hire a career coach.
A career coach will help you acquire all the necessary information for the career path you have ultimately chosen. They are well-resourced with the current career system in varied fields. Try hiring a coach that has worked with people selecting the same career path as you.
It is a myth that career coaches are for troubled and underperforming individuals when in reality, you are following the footsteps of prosperous people. If you think you cannot perform your best in the career you have chosen, career coaches will help you in doing so.
4. Write down your action plan.
A career action plan is simply a guide laying down all the steps you have to take to reach your goals. You have to follow the paths like you follow the map, from Point 1 to Point 2, from Point 2 to Point 3, and so on.
This may sound like a lot of struggles, and you will have to spend a significant amount of time formulating a detail-oriented and precise action plan.
Nevertheless, with the plan already forged, it will be easy for you to pursue it when you already know where you have to go. You can take the help of your career coach to write the plan. Include both short-term and long-term goals, and do not forget to celebrate the little victories as well!
5. Exposure.
Another significant step is to create your network with people who are employed on the same path. The more people you meet, the better insight you will get into what kind of atmosphere, people, and security you will get in that specific field. You will also learn about the disadvantages beforehand and maybe able to find antidotes for it. This will help you in fighting the nervousness and worry that you feel before stepping into a new path.