The evolving nature of job roles means that you cannot choose a job for life.
Your career journey is just like any other trip that you take with your friends, family and relatives. You decide on your destination based on your interests, budget, the time you can devote and the activities you plan to undertake on reaching there. Your career is no different. You need proper goals and purpose to give direction to your destination. At the same time, it is equally important to be flexible so that you do not miss opportunities that are emerging in the employment landscape.
Choose a career that aligns with your core values
You are your best judge and self-awareness is the cornerstone for choosing a career path. Your mentors and counsellors can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses but your values, personality, goals, aspirations and motivating factors are something that only you are privy to. For individuals choosing a career path gets easier if they know what their intrinsic values are. Values are attributes that give a sense of purpose to a job to those executing it. A consultant in a multinational company may value his prestige, material benefits and job security whereas a scientist may value intellectual challenge. Research into employee happiness suggests that our workplace happiness depends on how we identify and utilise our values in our career paths.
Personality assessment to understand role fitness
What other aspects of your personality should be taken into consideration, apart from your core values, while making a career choice? Understanding your personality can help you think about how you prefer to resolve crises, relate to people or manage your time. The Myers Briggs Assessment Tool (MBTI) can help you gain insights on your personality type. For instance, an introvert persona will be highly unlikely to undertake sales roles but will find a career in research quite fulfilling. At GuruQ, we offer one-on-one online mentoring for all subjects, competitive exams and professional courses. Our tutors pace their coaching style as per the learners’ needs and our assessment methods give customised feedback on each learner’s strengths and weaknesses.
Personal circumstances should not be ignored while making career choices
Beyond your values, personality and interest, there might be external factors that you should also take into account while making career choices. Some of the questions that need to be closely looked at are your reasons for location preference, your financial circumstances, your family and caring commitments or any other culture-specific issue that might make it difficult for you to sustain in a job role.
Deep dive into the opportunity landscape
Next on your list should be an exercise on opportunity mapping. Career advisers will prompt you with questions on the relevance of your degree in the market, your key strengths apart from your qualifications and whether you want to pursue a career solely on the basis of your education. The answers to these questions will help you in your career planning and align the opportunities with your values, personality and interests.
Research for job requirements
Career research comes next on the agenda of your career planning journey. One of the recommended ways to perform your career research is to closely monitor the prospect and target career websites. These websites will give you a bird’s eye view on the job requirements and skillsets needed. These will help you gauge if you are ready for the job market or need further education or training. To delve deeper into research, networking acts as a key tool in your decision-making. Networking with professionals will help you learn the intricacies of job culture and expectations over and beyond the job description.
Decision making and action planning
The finals stage in opting a career is to bring everything you have learnt about yourself and your opportunities together. A professional career guide or your mentor can help you explore your options and weigh the pros and cons. After that, all you need is to plan your actions so that you can achieve your goal of choosing a career that is beneficial to you.
The evolving nature of job roles means that you cannot choose a job for life. To manage changes, all of us have to be agile, resilient and adapt ourselves to keep our career wheel running at an optimal speed. It has become pertinent for new-age professionals to keep on learning throughout lives and undertake consistent career planning measures to pivot to relevant job roles.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house