How To Pick Your Career Path

Perform Career Tests And Research

Taking career tests is a smart move if you want to learn more about what jobs would suit your career journey. You can take a personality test to see if you are fit for a specific work culture. Other career tests can also help you find a job that matches your skills. Some of the most popular tests are:

Use Proven Career Assessments

Choosing a career is a different process for everyone. Google career assessment and youll return about hundreds of thousands of results. Do these assessment things actually work? Should you shell out money to take online quizzes? Clearly, theres a big market for career aptitude tests. Monster reviewed some and picked our top 10 free career assessment tools.

You can also try taking John Holland’s SDS an assessment that helps determine potential occupations and corresponding work environments based on your personality type.

The test is based on the scientific findings of award-winning psychologist, John Holland, who invented the Holland Codes, a system that places individuals into one of six categories: Doers, Thinkers, Creators, Helpers, Persuaders and Organizers. Each category corresponds to a variety of different career paths. The test isn’t free, but if it helps you find your true calling, itll have been the best money you ever spent.

What Are My Interests

The activities you enjoy doing in your free time can give you insights into the careers that would be satisfying and fulfilling for you. To figure out your interests, ask yourself:

• What hobbies do I enjoy?
• Do I prefer spending time indoors or outdoors?
• Do I enjoy working with people, animals, data or books?
• What activities would I miss the most if I could no longer do them?

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Career Planning 4 Step Planning Process

Knowing Yourself

Exploring what is out there

Making Decisions

Career planning is an ongoing process that can help you manage your learning and development.

You can use the four step planning process whether you are:

• an adult returning to education or adding on skills
• an adult changing job or career.

Career planning is the continuous process of:

• thinking about your interests, values, skills and preferences
• exploring the life, work and learning options available to you
• ensuring that your work fits with your personal circumstances
• continuously fine-tuning your work and learning plans to help you manage the changes in your life and the world of work.

You can revisit and make use of this process all the way through your career.

The career planning process has four steps:

Step 1: knowing yourself

Step 1: knowing yourself

Begin by thinking about where you are now, where you want to be and how youre going to get there.

Once you have thought about where you are at now and where you want to be, you can work on getting to know your skills, interests and values.

Begin by asking yourself the following questions:

• Where am I at now?
• Where do I want to be?
• What do I want out of a job or career?
• What do I like to do?
• What are my strengths?
• What is important to me?

Step 2: finding out

At the end of this step you will have a list of preferred occupations and/or learning options.

Step 3: making decisions

Ask yourself:

Step 4: taking action

Begin by asking yourself:

Its Ok To Not Have All The Answers

It can feel like theres a lot of pressure to make a decision. Your interests will change and evolve throughout your college experience, and you dont need to know today exactly what kind of job you want after graduation. BUT, its important to make sure youre headed in a general direction thats a good fit for you so that it doesnt take you longer to finish your degree, and so youll be well qualified for jobs when you graduate. By taking the steps above, you can feel confident youll end up on the right track.

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What Matters To Other People

None of us exist in a vacuum. Just as its important to get clear on what matters to you, its also important to consider how your decision will impact your loved ones because it probably will.

Whether its a partner, family member, or friend, ask the people who will be affected by your choices for their own thoughts, input, and feelings. This is especially important if youre making a decision about your career. Often, these kinds of choices have a strong influence over your finances and living situation, as well as the amount of time you can dedicate to certain relationships.

For example, lets say you are offered a job that youre excited about that aligns with your values and requires you to commute two hours into work every day. You may be okay with this personally, but you must acknowledge that this is time you will lose out on spending with your significant other, family, or friends. Your decision, then, not only impacts you it impacts those you care about.

This doesnt necessarily mean that you shouldnt take the job. However, it might mean that you should take the time to negotiate the offer to make it more closely aligned with both your values and those of the people around you. In this case, you might ask the hiring manager for a flexible work arrangement, one in which you come into the office only three days a week to limit your commute.

How To Develop Career Path Visibility In Your Workplace

A lack of career progression is one of the most common reasons why people take to the job market and leave their current position.

Employees can find themselves feeling dissatisfied in their job role because they cant see any room for progression. Or they look outside their organization and see other people with the same job title perhaps earning more or assuming different responsibilities.

However, behind the scenes, its not always that simple. For example, organizations may just have a different approach to job titles one senior finance manager may be performing the same role as a finance manager at most other organizations. Job titles can be misleading.

This is where job evaluation and career frameworks can be helpful.

Job Evaluation

Assessing the skills and responsibilities of a role is known as job evaluation. The evaluation process is the foundation for having fair pay and an accurate career framework. Often, people think its complex, but in practice, it can sometimes mean little more than ranking an organizations roles by importance. Sometimes rankings are point-based on the complexity of the roles responsibilities, or alternatively, put into career bands that represent roles according to the skills and responsibilities required, regardless of job function.

Establishing a Career Framework

Developing Career Path Visibility

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How To Pick A Career Path

You can make sensible professional judgments depending on your current experience and talents by choosing a career path. Consider your career ambitions, talents, and interests while making life decisions, such as which colleges to apply to and which entry position to begin with. You can also decide whether you want to get a specialized certification or a masters degree. In this post, well provide you with some helpful hints for identifying your interests and skills and matching them to a relevant work category so you can get started on a rewarding career.

Think About Your Short

Now that youve done all this thinking to choose a career thats right for you, your next step is to think about some achievable goals.

To make your top career choice a reality, what are you going to work towards in the next few months? And in the next few years?

Create a document or spreadsheet. List down all the steps you can take to achieve your goals and add a date youd like to achieve them by. Is there a grade you want to get on a school project or exam? A course youd like to research? An hour youd like to spend finding online interviews with people doing your dream job? Your goals can be small or large. They can be achieved this evening or next year but they must be achievable.

Create your list of achievable goals, add do-by dates, and youve taken a big step to not only choosing a career but setting your dream in motion.

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How To Choose A Career

As the writer Annie Dillard observed, How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Whether thats good news or bad depends on what youre doing most days hence the age-old question, Which career is right for me?

When selecting a career, its important to think strategically and identify the goals you want to accomplish over your 20-to-50-year career. Typically, the sooner you choose a functional career path, the more opportunities youll have to develop skills, build wealth and find career fulfillment.

Choosing the right career fit is an inherently personal choice that often depends on who you are and where you are in life. Maybe, for example, you are a recent college graduate looking to maximize your salary and income potential as well as your impact in your community. Or perhaps youre looking to transition from the military into the private sector. Or maybe youre halfway through your career and are looking to either move into executive management or change careers altogether.

Wherever you may find yourself, read on. Well explore a wide range of motivations, topics and tips to help you narrow down your options, take advantage of opportunities and make the best career choice possible.

An Easy Guide To Choosing The Right Career Path

Coming to the decision to completely change your career is certainly not something you can do overnight. Its important to take the time to assess your skills, interests, and personality in order to make the best decision for you. In this easy guide, we will walk you through the steps necessary to choose the right career path for you!

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Which Skills Set Me Apart

Everyone has abilities and activities that theyre good at. So the question is: what are you good at? This is one of the most important tips on how to choose your career. Find out what your talents are from childhood and which skills youve picked up over time.

Skills can be divided into hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills refer to the skills you learned by studying, e.g. like graphic design or painting. Soft skills refer to people and life skills you have, e.g. time management or communication. Examine different career paths and find out the one that best compliments your talents and skills.

Discover Your Personality Type

A personality type is a set of personality traits that can be grouped. There are multiple methods for discovering your personality type, many of which focus on your responses to different situations. Different personality types may naturally gravitate toward different interests and develop different strengths, including careers.

Different tests list common career choices for each personality type. If you take a variety of tests and one or two careers appear across multiple tests, that specific career is likely worth researching. Some popular tools you can use to identify your personality type include:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

This questionnaire is a self-reporting inventory that includes introspective questions to identify your psychological preferences. Using this information, the type indicator system classifies people based on four key dichotomies. With this information, you can identify your personality type out of 16 options.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter

This is a self-assessment questionnaire. While it is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, it more closely identifies roles that match each temperament type. The questionnaire focuses on behaviors and temperaments rather than preferences.

The Jungian Type Index

This self-assessment can provide you with an overview of your personality type and recommended careers by identifying Jungian cognitive functions or explanations behind certain psychological preferences.

Read more:Guide: 16 Personality Types

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How To Choose The Right Career Path For You In 9 Steps

Jennifer Herrity is a seasoned career services professional with 12+ years of experience in career coaching, recruiting and leadership roles with the purpose of helping others to find their best-fit jobs. She helps people navigate the job search process through one-on-one career coaching, webinars, workshops, articles and career advice videos on Indeed’s YouTube channel.

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Learn how to get clarity into your ideal career and start pursuing that path immediately in this virtual workshop with Tracy Timm, founder of Thrivist.

When you were young and people asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, they were asking about your desired career path. Some career paths are straightforward but others may include detours along the way. Actively choosing a career path, however, is a great way to attain the right education and experiences and build the right skills. To do so, its important to reflect on your interests and career goals as you make certain life choices, such as which school to attend, which entry-level job is right for you, or whether to obtain a post-graduate degree or specialized certification.

In this article, we explain how to choose a career path by identifying your key skills and interests, matching those qualities to a potential industry and starting a career.

What Matters To You

Once youve connected with your emotions, youre ready for the next step: consciously identifying your values.

What are values? Theyre simply defined as what really matters to you, or your why. That is, they can help you define why a certain decision feels more meaningful to you than another.

Understanding your why will allow you to make choices that align directly with the things you care about choices that will keep you fulfilled longer term.

For example, lets say youre trying to decide between two jobs that youve been offered. One is a high-paying corporate job and the other is a job working at a nonprofit with a reasonable, but lower, salary. If you take the time to identify your values and find that helping others is one of them, but money isnt high on your list, that makes your decision to work at the nonprofit a bit easier.

There are a number of ways to figure out what your values are. One of the best is through formal psychological assessments. My favorite is the Enneagram personality test because the results describe your personality traits and motivations in the context of ideal circumstances and stressful situations, which can give you a more holistic look at who you are. But there are a number of other credible resources out there as well: DISC, LIFO Survey, Big Five Personality Test, 16 Personality Factors Test, and Hogans Motive, Values, Preference Inventory . All of these tests are supported by science and extensive research.

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Consider Your Lifestyle And Goals

When you are choosing a career, its important to consider your lifestyle and goals. For example, if you have young children at home, you might want to choose a career that allows you to work from home or has flexible hours. Alternatively, if you are looking for a high-paying job, you might want to consider careers in the medical or financial field. Lastly, think about your long-term goals. Are you looking for a stable job with good benefits? Or are you hoping to start your own business one day? All of these questions will require answers that will help you make the right choice when it comes to your career.

Seven Tips For Choosing A New Career Path

Are you stuck in a career that youre not passionate about?

If so, youre not alone. Most of us choose a career based on interests that we develop during our teens or early twenties. And since our interests and priorities change over time, its not uncommon to find yourself in a profession thats not a good match anymore. The good news is that its entirely possible to change career paths. The following seven tips will help you get started:

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Define Your Wants And Needs

Its impossible to determine if a career path will suit you unless you know what things in life are most and least important to you. The first thing you should do to begin assessing what matters the most in your career path search is to make a simple list of everything that matters to you when searching for a career.

Here are some common elements to consider when defining job-related desires:

• Compensation and benefits

• Where you would need to live

• The type of work you would be doing

• Whether you will have a lot of freedom or will have to follow strict guidelines

• If you want to be conducting routine work or have a constantly changing workday

• The level of fulfillment you get from your work

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Once you have the base elements that you care about, you can refine that information. Be specific, such as setting a minimum target for how much money you can make in five or 10 years, for example. You should also sort these desires into two categories based on whether it is something you would like to have in your career or something you absolutely must have in your career. This list will become an invaluable tool for narrowing down career paths that dont satisfy your wants and needs.