New year, new career? It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? While the new year is a great time to make resolutions, it is also a good time to evaluate your career and ensure you are getting everything you need from what you do. After all, we spend over 90,000 hours at work on average over our lifetime, so you may as well spend some of them doing something you love.
But what if you don’t know what type of career you want or how to go about making changes? No problem; this post has some tips to help you find the career satisfaction you know you have been looking for.
What Do You Enjoy?
When looking at changing your career, the first port of call is to identify what you enjoy doing. It’s as simple as that. Do you enjoy the work you currently do? Do you have hobbies you enjoy and would like to use to make a career?
But, just as important as looking at what you do like is looking at what you don’t like and would benefit your life in any way.
What Skills Do You Have?
Another good way to determine what career will work for you or how you can make changes is to look at your current skills. It can be easy to get lost looking at the qualifications you might need to pursue a new career, but what you already know can be instrumental, too. Do you have qualifications in anything that can help you move up the ladder? Do you have soft skills that can be used in other niches or transferable skills that can give you a leg up in a new job? Everyone has skills in some areas. Be it being an excellent communicator, meaning you can use this skill for any customer or patient-facing position. Or you might be good with numbers, meaning a career in finance could be a good option, or you might have excellent problem-solving skills, making you a catch for institutes that need forward or out-of-the-box thinkers to make advancements and innovations. Don’t sell yourself short, and look at what you already offer to help you find a career that can utilize these skills.
Set Your Goals
Once you know what you do and don’t want to do and what skills you have that you can use to form your new career trajectory, you need to implement some goals to work towards.
Whether this is getting a pilates certification online to help you become a Pilates instructor, or it’s going back to college to retrain in a new sector or giving yourself a deadline to have found a new job doing what you do but has better career prospects, setting the goals and give yourself something to aim towards.
Your goals don’t even need to be specific as to the examples mentioned above; it can simply be to have researched suitable careers and eliminate ones that don’t appeal to you or vice versa. Just set some goals, give your goals a deadline, and make things happen.
Changing your career isn’t always easy, but then neither is staying in a job role that isn’t giving you the fulfilment you need. Be proactive and take the first steps in moving forward and finding out what it is you want to do, be it becoming your own boss, climbing the rungs of management where you are currently working or completely retraining in something completely different.
