Questions To Ask Yourself When Choosing A Career
You might not think it's that important to choose a career. At the end of the day, it's just a job, right? It's not like it changes your overall happiness, your relationships, or even your mental health. Except that what you do for a living does have an effect on all of these things, whether you work for someone else or have decided to be your own boss. If you're in the wrong field because you don't like what you do or even actively hate it, or because it doesn't make you happy, or because you know there's something else you should be doing instead, it will hurt your life. If you have a job you love and are happy with, you'll find that everything else in your life gets better, not least because you have a better attitude.
With this in mind, you can see how important it is to choose the right job or know when to change jobs if you're not happy. Here are some questions to help you figure out what you should really be doing.
What Education Or Training Do You Need?
Not all jobs need professional qualifications, but some do need specific degrees or some kind of certification from the industry. Once you've narrowed down your options and started to think more about the different jobs you might be able to do well in, it's important to know what kind of education or training you'll need. You might already be qualified, or you might need to go back to school. No matter what it is, you need to decide if you are willing to do it.
Not everyone likes school, so a job that doesn't require more schooling or that relies on training on the job would be a better fit than one that requires a degree or specific industry qualifications. If you like to learn or know you can, especially if it will help you get a good job, you can figure out how to move forward with your plans and get the qualifications you need. In either case, knowing what you like to do and what is needed will help you think about the careers that will work best for you in the long run.
What Are Your Interests?
If you're not sure what kind of job will work for you and, more importantly, make your life better, there aren't many better places to start than by thinking about what you're interested in. What do you do outside of work that makes you happy and is interesting enough for you to spend your free time on? This could be about your hobbies and will tell you not only what you like to do but also what you are good at. But even if you aren't "good" in the traditional sense, that doesn't mean you can't get ideas from the idea. After all, you don't have to be a great artist or musician to have some creative spark that will help you choose a more creative career. Keep in mind that you don't have to look for ways to make money from your hobby right away. It's just a good way to start thinking about what you might want to do with your career.
If you don't want to think about specific things like your hobby when looking for a new job, or even your first job, that will make you happy and make you feel fulfilled, you can think about what you like in a more general way. For example, do you like to be inside or outside? Do you prefer to be with people or on your own? Are you happy to work from home, or would you rather go to a certain place of work? These will help you narrow down your ideas and do a better job of searching.
What Are Your Skills?
As we've already said, you don't have to be good at something for you to enjoy it. You can enjoy something a lot even if you're not very good at it. But if you want to figure out what kind of career is best for you, you should think carefully about your skills. This is because your skills may be what helps you decide what to do next and what direction you should go in.
There are both hard and soft skills. Hard skills are the ones that are directly related to a job, like being able to use a certain piece of equipment or knowing how tax laws work, among other things. You can learn these when you know what you want to do for a living, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't think about them when you're deciding what to do. This might help you if you already have some hard skills that you got from work experience, school, or doing your own research.
But the soft skills are the ones you should think about the most. These are skills that are much harder to learn. You can pick up some of them as you go through life, but many of them are personality traits that you already know and use. Soft skills are also called "life skills," and they include things like being able to manage your time, talk to people, work in a team, and organize your things.
Can you use your hard skills and soft skills together to make a plan for your career? Or, you could think about all of your soft skills and then find out what hard skills you need to get the job you think would be best for you.
What Are Your Values?
There are certain things in life that are going to be important to you, no matter who you are or what your interests are. These things are called values. This might refer to attaining financial security, striking a healthy balance between work and personal life, or rectifying some kind of societal wrongdoing. It might even be political, which is why you like to wear Donald Trump T shirts. There are literally hundreds of such instances that you might use to illustrate what your own personal set of values may be.
If you want a profession that you will perform well in and that you will like – two things that are vital, especially the latter – then your work is going to have to fit with your values in order for you to have success in it. If you are eager to find financial security, for instance, you might be more interested in what a job pays than anything else. On the other hand, you might not worry about how much money you'll earn as long as you can do some good for a specific segment of society.
What Is Your Personality?
How would you describe yourself? This is a good and important question, but before you can answer it, you need to know what a personality is. Personality is made up of what you think, how you feel, and how you act. When you put this all together, you can see who you are. It can be hard to really know what kind of personality you have, but there are some questions you can ask yourself that will help you figure it out.
Some of the questions include whether you prefer leading or following, whether you like working in a team or by yourself, are you a thinker or a doer, analytical or creative, and more.
If you know the answers to these questions, you'll know more about your personality type and, as a result, the kind of job that would be best for you.
