6 Proven Steps to Choosing the Best Career for Yourself

When the time comes for you to pick a career, you will find yourself standing in front of a multitude of options.

Yes, the choice can really be a difficult one to make, especially when you consider the host of options you have at that particular point in time. Too many options are equivalent to too many troubles; hence, the confusion is quite naturally justified to a certain extent.

But how can you stop all your procrastinations and choose yourself a career that suits you in the best possible manner? The following steps can help.

1. Assess yourself as carefully and as realistically as possible

Before you delve deep into choosing the right career path for yourself, you should learn more about yourself, in particular.

You should know about things like your:

• Values,
• Soft skills,
• Interests,
• Aptitudes, as well as
• Personality.

A mere knowledge of the traits mentioned above can make you aware of the fact whether a certain career is appropriate for you or not.

Note: You can even use self-assessment tools for this purpose of yours.

2. Make a thorough list of careers to explore

You’ll probably have a huge number of occupations in front of you based on the self-assessment you did, either via yourself or through the tools (look in the previous point).

To make yourself more organized in your approach, it’s advisable to combine them all into one master list.

For example, if you are thinking of a programme like masters in teaching online or a career opportunity in software engineering, this is how you can do it to get the best results in the long run:

• Firstly, Look for the careers that are appearing on multiple lists (based on the self-assessment done by the tools or by yourself). These are your common factors. Write them down as one on your master list.
• Next, come to the careers having a good enough appeal to your interests. Note them down one-by-one on your master list.
• Then finally, look for the ones that are entirely unknown to you. Note them down on your master list for future reference.

3. Explore your master list as thoroughly as possible

So you have collected your data (refer to point 2) well. Now it’s time to do some research.

In this step, you are going to gather information, on the basis of which you are going narrow down your master list to only a few handful ones to form a short list of your choice.

You may use published resources such as job descriptions (you will be able to find that in bulks on the internet), educational, training and licensing requirements (can also be found on the internet) to know whether the careers penciled out by you on your master list are your cup of tea or not.

4. Make a final shortlist

So the research part is done and dusted. It’s time to streamline everything in order to get a short list of your choice.

Your short list should be entirely based on things that you have learned from research, in particular (refer to point 3).

Eliminate the careers that you don’t want to pursue without any further ado, and keep only the ones that you feel are up to your taste. Do this in an organized manner, and you will see that you have got yourself a short list in almost no time.

5. Conduct factual interviews to get the last piece of the puzzle

This is more in-depth research capable of getting you that single, perfect choice you wanted at the beginning of this discussion.

In this step, you are going to conduct factual interviews with people having first-hand knowledge of the occupations mentioned on your short list.

LinkedIn is an excellent platform that can come in handy for you, especially when career-oriented interviews are concerned. And the best thing about LinkedIn is the fact that it won’t even cost you a dime.

6. So there’s the final one- MAKE the choice

So you have done your research, conducted a factual interview with a credible person of your choice; now it’s time to make your decision.

Pick that one occupation that you think will give the most satisfaction of all based on all the information you have collected. Now go ahead with the choice with your eyes closed and hands tied behind your back.

Don’t worry; you’ll always have the chance to switch your career, in case the choice doesn’t bode well for you in the nearly foreseeable future. So make your choice freely.

So that’s all for now then folks. It’s time we bring this article to an end for now. Hope you had a good and useful read.