Finding a good career path doesn’t seem easy in today’s economy. You might even feel like it’s hopeless, but you’d be wrong to think that. The modern economy is a dynamic and evolving place where ambitious and competent people like you will always have a future. And, we’ve prepared the following 10 tips to help you figure out how to find the right career path for you.
1. Career Assessment Test
You’ll naturally want your career to pay well, provide you with a good lifestyle, offer learning opportunities, and lead you to a good life overall. You’ll almost definitely find people from every industry who enjoy these benefits to various degrees. So, which path is right for you? A career test helps clarify that.
Career tests help you analyze your skills and experiences more objectively to help you make a more informed decision. Specifically, consider a psychometric career test, since it’ll take your personality, aptitude, and cognitive abilities into account. Psychometric career tests are also data-driven and aim to match you with the best industry you’re personally suited for.
2. Identify what you value more
Everyone wants a good salary, but life is more than just money. Some careers, like being a lawyer or doctor, offer more money but also give you higher stress and less free time. Other careers, like being a project manager are much less stressful but also pay less. It’s up to you to decide what mixture of money, stress, freedom, and personal growth you want.
You should deeply think about this because your career should match your personal goals for optimum success. For instance, You don’t want to become a lawyer or a doctor if you don’t want to put in the hours of relentless work required for either. You also don’t want to be a project manager if you want to earn top-tier and become a workaholic.
3. Take up trial jobs
Trial jobs sound like a potential waste of time where you work for someone without even being compensated. But, they’re an excellent way to weed out careers that you’re completely uninterested in doing. After all, you’re unlikely to do well in an industry you can’t even survive a month-long trial job in.
For example, let’s say you get a trial job as a project manager for a month. You may think you have the right talents for it, but a trial job could prove so otherwise. At your project managing trial job, you might learn that you actually hate using Trello or can’t stand to handle people or organize tasks–that’s completely fine. You’ve learned this isn’t the right fit for you.
4. Avoid Inaction
Being uncertain tends to make people lazy. You might decide to either not think about your career at all for now, or even worse spend all your time thinking about it. You’re going about things the wrong way if you’re spending every waking moment analyzing potential future career paths.
Thinking about work only gets you so far. The next step has to be action. For instance, if you can’t decide between being a doctor or a lawyer, then go meet and discuss careers with a doctor and a lawyer. Or, you could take an aptitude test for either profession to see which one you’re better for–anything is better than nothing.
5. Grab the opportunities
Never let go of a good opportunity when it presents itself, even if it doesn’t seemingly align with your goals. Maybe, you have a chance at a great internship in a company’s marketing department, but you don’t know if you wanna be a marketer. Take the internship anyway, and leave marketing if it doesn’t work out.
You want to try everything you can before finally settling on a career, so it makes no sense to let go of a good opportunity. Going back to our example, if marketing works out for you that internship could be the building block of your career. And, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll at least have an impressive item on your resume.
6. Start by taking one step at a time
A career takes years or decades to build, and you’ll likely take many twists and turns along the way–some of which will be caused by things outside your control. So, don’t feel like you need to have everything figured out right now.
Take your career one step at a time. Look at the best options at every step and choose what works for you then. Don’t spend day 1 deciding what law firm you’ll work for and what types of corporate clients you want once you become a world-famous corporate lawyer.
7. Lifestyle Considerations
Everyone has individual lifestyle preferences, and ideally, your occupation should match them. For example, you can’t be a great policeman or firefighter if you can’t wake up at 3 am during an emergency. You also can’t be a great lawyer if you want strict working times after which you relax for most of the day–it’s likely not gonna happen.
So, critically think about the kind of lifestyle you can and want to live. Your desired lifestyle shouldn’t dictate what you do, but it’s a helpful way to understand what you likely can’t do.
8. Think out of the box
The modern world has a rapidly expanding and diverse working environment where new jobs are constantly created and old ones are routinely destroyed. Social media managers, remote team managers, and social media analysts are just a few occupations that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
You’ll likely find new jobs popping up every day during your career, so stay flexible and ready to grab new opportunities soon as they’re born.
Wrapping things up, a great modern career path is all about being intelligent and flexible. You gotta match your personal strengths and goals with the type of work you do. You should also be flexible and ready to accept change when it comes to building the best career path for yourself.