Career Choices

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Understanding the process of making career choices and managing your career is a basic life skill that everyone should understand.

Your career decisions have such a profound effect on all aspects of your life, it's important to have the knowledge and resources needed to make smart, informed decisions.

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 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 be rewarded throughout your career.

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 the "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.

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Find more information about 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.

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 Skills Increase Your Job Options
Transferable skills are the skills you develop through any activity. By thinking of and marketing yourself as a set of skills that you can offer to employers, instead of just a job title, you can open up a lot of opportunities for yourself.

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.

Work Values
Do you know whether your work values and personal needs match with your career choice? Matching work values with career choice is crucial for job satisfaction.

Life Work Balance
It's a shame to live life entrenched in a job that doesn't fit well with your personal needs or allow you to achieve life work balance. You'll find your own best career change answers when you take the time to consider your personal needs and understand how your work will impact positively and negatively on those needs.

Evaluate Career Counseling Employment Services
When you search online for career management advice, you'll find everything from tips from people who've read a couple of resume guides and now feel qualified to give career advice, through to quality support from professionals who've studied career counseling theory and practice and have helped hundreds of clients. Knowing how to evaluate career counseling employment services will help to ensure you are getting excellent support and guidance from an experienced professional.

How to Choose a Career
Learn how to choose a career and consider all of the ways your new career will impact your life. Before you dive in and start writing your resume, take some time to think through and plan exactly what you need and want from your next job.

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.

 
Get more Career Change Advice and Tips
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