Career Decision Making Process
Career decision making process is very simple but requires lot of hard work and commitment. Its a three step process:
step 1 is know yourself
step 2 is know your work/career options and
step 3 is setting goal and taking action
In short the more you know about your skills, interests and what type of career options available, the more quickly you get into action and master the game of life. once you start moving into right direction then its up to you to decide how fast you want to move toward your destination.
Every long term goal require a game plan, you cannot become an engineer just by thinking, you need a game plan of how many hour your need to study, what courses you need to take and how much numbers you need to get an admission in engineering university or college. similarly we also need a game plan for our career success.
A simple formula for career success is
Interest + Career Goal + Action = Career Success
Follow the following three steps to navigate toward career success.
Know Yourself
The most common way to know yourself is to ask why, what, who, when and where questions to yourself, and sometime its difficult to answer these questions. But there are more structured assessment tools available in market which helps to answer some of these questions. Assessment tools help you learn about your interest, skills, personality and goals. After taking the interest assessment you can supplement your self knowledge by taking value survey, personal style survey and skill survey to create your career blueprint.
Know your work
To know your career goal, you need to explore your career options. there are different ways with which you can explore your career options, one is collecting information about career fields and occupations, which include labor market information about job description, career prospects, earnings, educational qualification and career paths. other options include networking, information interviewing, job shadowing and volunteering.
It is recommended to create a portfolio of all this occupational research. Sometime it takes few months and sometime it take years to collect this information and to make an informed career selection. A portfolio helps keep your information in one place and can be either electronic or in hard copy.
Taking Action
Once you finished with your occupational exploration, select those occupations that you find most interesting. List your top five. From this list you should be able to select a career goal. Goals are simple ideas about what you'd like to accomplish. Your long term career goal is to be a creative copy writer for an advertising company. What short term goals do you need to achieve your long-term goal? List the skills, education, and experience required for your career goal.
Think about what is most important in your life and the career choices that fit to your values.
Once you set your career goal, than its time to put them into action. Remember career exploration is a learning process. you might make mistake or change your mind. that is the part of the process. If one goal or strategy doesn't work out for you, restart and try another strategy or goal. Often there are different career paths to achieve the same goal.
