Worried that you’re pursuing the wrong career path? Haven’t spent enough time considering your options? Not sure you enjoy your current job?
While common, these concerns can be signs that it’s time to change your career path. It’s important you often take inventory of your career and life goals and compare them to your current position. It’s best to do this about twice a year because your ideal career changes over time as your experience and skills grows.
Here are some tips on how to best take inventory of your skills and your experience to best find your ideal career.
Be Honest
Understand exactly where you are with your skills. While it can be tempting to think of yourself as more skilled than you are, it doesn’t serve a purpose in this exercise. This isn’t a resume, you don’t have to exaggerate or be flowery about your experience. Be honest and take into account the skills you think you’ll need in the future.
Consider your Education
While often ignored, your education is an important part of what makes your career path. Take into account the education you have, and see if there’s any skills you learned that you haven’t been utilizing in your current role. People often discount the impact of their education, but your education path shows where you’re passionate and sometimes you can stray away from this in your job without noticing.
As a practice, once you discover skills you think you’ll need in the future, find some courses you can take to improve these.
Interests
Understanding your complete area of interest is the most important part. While the feeling of being stuck in a career path is common, it isn’t true. You can move your role at any point, even if it’s in another role. Think of your interests at work, as well as those outside of it. Depending on your goals, you may be more inclined to pursue an interest of yours that is outside of your work constraints.
After you have decided on a career path you are interested in, take a week to mull it over and weigh the positives and negatives. While the career path you select certainly isn’t something you have to do for the rest of your life, coming back to it with fresh eyes will help you see things you might have originally overlooked.
The post Finding your Ideal Career appeared first on Blog.