How to Know You Have Chosen the Right Career
How many times have you questioned yourself about the career choice you made? Every time you had a bad day at work or one of your friends boasted of his salary and a flashy lifestyle, you fall into a vicious cycle of depressing thoughts, wishing you had a better career or job. However, there also must be days when it feels like it’s the best job in the world. In such a lopsided situation, how are you supposed to know that you have chosen the right career? This post discusses the same.
There are not too many decisions of greater importance and consequences than choosing a career path. After all, the choice you make is going to affect the entire course of your future. As an informed and educated individual there must be a lot of things that must have motivated you to make that particular choice. Ultimately, it boils down to whether those were the right motivations to get inspired from, or maybe you could have made a better use of your talent and skills in a different career?
A bad patch at work can make it even harder to discern between the right and the wrong. Fluctuating feelings, followed by constant introspection can cloud your thoughts about your career preferences.
Now here’s how you can clear your thoughts about your choice of profession:
You spent all your high school daydreaming of it
We all dream of becoming something or someone when we are children and although our fragile imagination often keeps on changing our notion of the perfect career, sometimes there is one profession or idea that just sticks to the mind. Say you looked at stars and were fascinated to reach and touch the moon, and driven by this inherent desire you ended up with a career as an astronaut. There is no chance that you would have a second thought about any other career all throughout your life.
The point being driven home is that if you do end up in a career that has been your dream, or passion in high school and college, then it probably is the right choice. However, if due to some unavoidable circumstances you made a last-minute change in the plans, and decided against settling in a career different from your passion, college major, or high school dream, chances are that you would need a counselor to advise you on career change somewhere down the line.
Identifying your personality
This article by Mr. Tomas at Psychology Today clearly highlights the relation between personality types and vocations. The article talks about Holland’s theory, which came in the 1980s and talked about the taxonomy of work environment, enabling him to organize the existing jobs into a wider family of jobs which is similar to what you do with personality traits. According to this taxonomy, jobs are classified between Realistic, Artistic, Investigative, Artistic, Enterprising, Social and Conventional. Therefore, knowing what your personality type is a significant step towards identifying if you are in the right career.
You can put your skills to maximum use
If you can fully utilize whatever inherent skills you have or the knowledge that you have acquired in your lifetime to its maximum potential, you are in the right career. For instance, if no one can beat you when it comes to numbers, then a career as finance manager or a job as account manager would be the perfect fit. Furthermore, if you are always looking forward to updating your professional abilities and expanding your skill set in order to advance yourself, you are probably in the right career.
You are willing to dedicate your weekends for the extra workThe best test of whether you love your job or not, and consequently are in a right career is when you have to put in extra hours to finish work that is not your primary responsibility. If you love your job, you probably won’t mind dedicating at least a couple of your weekends to either finish off extra work or start a new assignment, or help out a colleague of yours. On the other hand, if you never fail to complain in case you are required to put in even one extra hour on a work day or otherwise, then you might probably need a career change.
Courtesy :https://www.careersavvy.co.uk/how-to-know-you-have-chosen-the-right-career/
