Considering a Career Change?

Considering a Different Kind of Job or a New Career?

Here are two approaches.

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There are many reasons that individuals might want to consider a career change. These include remuneration levels, the need for a better work-life balance, wanting a fresh/exciting challenge, for reasons of stress in the current role, to wanting to pursue something about which one is more passionate. Such motivations are often emotional in their nature and are hard to evaluate in a systematic way. Emotions can both drive you towards a new career and away from the career you are in. In my experience, discussing all these issues with someone who knows you well, can help to understand why you want to move and what you may want to move to.

While there are many ways to go about making important career decisions like this, here are two approaches. One is simple and straight forward and the other requires more reading, research, and consideration.

A Basic Approach.

We start by gathering information and at the most basic level you could ask yourself a few questions:

? Why am I considering an alternative?

? What do I like/dislike about my current work?

? What do I like/dislike generally?

? What skills do I have that I would like to use more?

? What are my interests inside and outside work?

? Am I an Introvert or an Extrovert?

Look on the internet for a definition of these terms as they are not easily understood. Most people are neither one nor the other but have both characteristics with some weighting towards one side. You can even find some free internet tests on Introversion / Extroversion. This may give you an indication about whether you draw your energy from, and like working with large groups of people or you need more balance between teamwork and work on your own in order to energise your thoughts and actions.

Put these same questions to someone who knows you well for their opinion.

If the combined answers point in a certain direction, then start to look at job advertisements related to that area or look at jobs that would utilize these primary skills and/or interests.

A More Systematic Approach.

There are many fine books written about choosing the right career or an alternate career path. A visit to your local library will provide you with a lot of reading material and decision-making methodologies on this subject. There are also many services, both online and face-to-face, to dig deeper into the subject of career choice. I will outline one of them to demonstrate roughly how they work.

I have been particularly impressed by the work of Dr Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania.

There is a lot about him on the internet including YouTube presentations. These talk about his main focus of Positive Psychology. Within this broad area he also focuses on the impact of Positive Psychology on job choice. You can find his website and do the ‘Via Character Strengths Questionnaire”. There is a modest cost involved.

There are 24 Character Strengths in all, and they include such subjects as:

Wisdom and Knowledge, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, Transcendence.

The results of the questionnaire will not tell you what job you should be doing but describes what things are important to you. That is a good starting point to choosing a new career or even looking at your current career in quite a new and unique way by leveraging your strong characteristics to gain more satisfaction and purpose from your current work.

Reading your report alongside the relevant book (which can often be found in your local library) is a way of deeply examining the question of career direction.

As I said the above is just one example of an approach you might take to consider a new career direction. There are many alternatives both online and face-to-face with a Career Coach or a Psychologist who specializes in career counselling. Dedicated work with an individual Career Coach or Psychologist is obviously more effective because they are deeply focusing on you and your needs. However, such individual consultation is more expensive of course.

Looking at the Alternatives.

Once you have a view about a new direction then researching that direction is quite important. A useful government website is https://www.onetonline.org/

This site contains a lot of information about different jobs, the skills and qualifications required, the work involved and the requirements including personal characteristics. It also looks at the strength of demand for jobs in most of their categories.

Beyond that, talking to people in that field is by far the most useful thing you can do to get some interactive feedback on what is involved in general and on a day-to-day basis. This will help you understand the job, and the career, in much more detail and is a very good line of inquiry along the pathway to making a new choice in your career direction.

That’s all for now?….?Have a great week.???????????????????????????????????????????Phillip Powell

___________________________________________________________

The Mr Job Tracker Job Search Learning and Coaching Program.

(Resume writing, interviews, everything your Job Search needs)

Helping you to get the job you want .... faster.

Mr Job Tracker (thinkific.com)

____________________________________________________________

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