Career Choices

Understanding the process of making career choices and managing your career is a basic life skill that everyone should have. Your career choices have a big impact on the life you lead, and knowing how to make smart choices will give you an enormous amount of power to shape your life.

Many people mistakenly believe that choosing a career is a one time event that happens some time in early adulthood. However, career management is actually a life-long process, and we continue to make consequential career choices over the years.

Whether you are looking for a new job, aiming to take the next step at your current job, completely changing your career or planning your retirement options, you are making career decisions.

Using good resources and occasionally the guidance of a career counselor can help you to make those decisions well.

So many people jump right to creating a new resume when they want to take action in their career. However, career management and job search is about so much more than writing a good resume.

If you take the time to learn about, think through and act on the four main areas of career management, you'll have all of the information you need to make good choices for yourself.

1. Understand Yourself

   Your interests, abilities, values and personal needs and realities should all be taken into account in any career decision making process. You spend countless hours at work, and it impacts your life in so many ways; it makes sense that you should be fully informed before making such profound decisions.

2. Understand Your Options

   Do you know how many different career choices are available to you? Both The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (American) and The National Occupational Classification (Canadian) list well over 20,000 different job titles.

   So unless you've actively explored a variety of career options, there's a very good chance that there are great possibilities available to you, and you don't even realize they exist.

3. Connect Your Information

   Match your understanding of yourself with your understanding of possible career options. Once you have developed a good understanding of yourself, you will be able to combine that self knowledge with your career and labor market research to determine potential careers that are a great fit for you.

4. Make it Happen

   When you've made a well informed decision, then you're ready to make it happen. Making use of good career guidance and resources will help you to acquire the education, skills and experience needed to get the job and learn and implement effective job search strategies.

Avoid taking a "ready, fire, aim" approach to making career choices and job searching.

Time spent understanding your needs, researching your career options and developing outstanding job search skills, guided by great career resources, is a powerful investment in your future.

Learn How to Make Smart Career Choices

Choose It! for Decision Making Confidence
Decision making confidence and smart planning will help you to gain enormous control over the direction of your career and your future. Choose It! is a free decision making software program that helps you think logically and systematically through all kinds of choices.

Career Decision Test - Decisional Balance
Are you trying to make a career decision and feeling stuck? Try this career decision test. If you're the kind of person who likes to make pro and con lists as a way of making decisions, you'll like using this decisional balance worksheet.

Career Research
Use this excellent career research tool to discover new career options.

Pursuing Career Success on Your Own Terms
Take some time to think through your motivations for pursuing career success. If you're following someone else's dream and not really pursuing your own version of career success, then you could be setting yourself up for self sabotage.

Highest Paying Careers
Top ten lists of the highest paying careers have limited value when you are making career choices. While career salary statistics are important to have, simple lists of best paying careers limit you because, they carry extremely limited information.

Transferable Skill Worksheet
When you understand the power of your transferable skill sets, you can open up a whole new realm of job options and career possibilities for yourself.

Transferable Skills Analysis
More tools and strategies for conducting a thorough transferable skills analysis.

Online Career Counseling Resources
The number of career options that exist can be pretty astounding once you start to do your research. Learn how a little time spent using good online career counseling resources can make all the difference in your ability to make appropriate career decisions for yourself and conduct a fruitful job search.