Are you ready for a new career, not just another dead end job? If you want to make 2023 your year, you’ll need to go beyond the basics of updating your resume and talking points. Here is a step by step guide to finding the career of your dreams.
Step One: Focus on Your Strengths
What brings you joy? What comes naturally to you? Do you have a passion for numbers or a knack for all things mechanical? When do your friends come to you, maybe if they need something fixed? Do you have a creative eye? How do you add value to the world? Taking the time to assess your strengths can help you identify a career that might be a natural fit.
Step Two: Find Your Growth Opportunities
It would be boring to choose a career that only relies on your current strengths. So the next step is to identify areas where you would like to grow and evolve. What are curious about? Do you want to learn coding or baking or physics or painting? You may not have any interest in turning your curiosities into careers, but they can help you identify the skills you actually want to develop.
Tap into what’s driving your curiosity, and then figure out how the skills you want to develop align with your current strengths. Figuring out how steps one and two fit together can help you narrow down possible career avenues to pursue.
Step Three: Analyze Your Previous Jobs
Think about the jobs you have most and least enjoyed, and start to look for patterns. How would you describe your ideal day at work? Do you prefer a more formal office environment or someplace laid back and casual? What makes a workday awful for you? List what you liked best about your favorite job. What would you change about it?
Step Four: Identify Your Priorities
No career will provide everything that’s important to you. But the right fit will offer your key motivators, so it’s worth determining what those are. Examples include, but are not limited to:
- Helping others
- An important mission
- High pay
- Work-life balance
- Being part of a team
- Flexible hours or remote work
- Working with your hands
- Working in the digital space
Step Five: Learn Your Options
Start with a list of five industries that interest you, such as manufacturing or healthcare. Then start looking at what roles are available within each industry. Find out what each role entails, how people working in that role describe it, and what qualifications are required. As you do your research, consider how each role matches with what you’ve learned in the first four steps.
Now you’re ready to start making your dreams a reality. You may need to get some training, update your resume to highlight transferable skills, and revisit your answers to common interview questions. But once you know where you want to go, your career path will become clear.
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Are you looking for work? Custom Staffing can help! Take a look at our available positions, and then apply today.