We all have to make career choices at various times throughout our working life. Every job is different though so everyone will handle these in his or her own way.
Be In Control
It’s important to exercise as much control as you can over your career. When you’re the one in charge of your career journey, you control the planning, the timing, and how to put those plans into action. Making good decisions about your career will ultimately help you to:
• Adjust quickly to change
• Make good use of career breaks when they come up.
• Manage your career, and be in charge of it
However, before you attempt to make valid career decisions you should have some understanding of yourself as an individual, and how you operate.
How Do YOU Make Decisions In General?
Making decisions can be hard. It requires thinking about what you value, what you are good at, what you like and don't like. At the same time, you also have to deal with information, impressions and ideas rolling at you from the outside world. Sometimes they can throw you a real curve ball! How do you make decisions in the light of this?
Are you a rational, ordered person, or one who works on instinct and intuition? Do you find it easier to go with your gut and do what feels right rather than what your head tells you to do? Perhaps you’re a private person, preferring to weigh things up yourself, keeping your thoughts and feelings private.
How Do YOU Make Important Decisions?
Some people make significant career decisions when they choose the subjects for their final school years (yes, they really are that organized!). Others don’t really find their niche in life until after a year or two spent dabbling in various things. They may for instance join the fire services as a volunteer fire fighter to serve their community before deciding that a professional career in the industry is their calling. From there, they may launch into other career paths, such as becoming a Fire Inspector or Fire Investigator.
Overcoming Those Decision-making Hurdles
Even if you’ve known what you want to do since grade school, you can still be confronted with some tough obstacles when it comes to making definitive career decisions.
• Making decisions about your career can affect other people – family, partners, friends etc – and lead to complicated social and inter-relational problems. How do you factor this into your decisions?
• You may be faced with a range of options within your career choice, each with its own trade-offs and concessions. Which do you choose?
• Career affecting decisions can be complex and have significant consequences. They can have unexpected fall-out, things you couldn’t foresee or didn’t know about when you first made the decision. How do you deal with these if they occur?
When you consider all the twists and turns like these that can affect your life and career, it’s not surprising if you’ve made decisions about your career at times that weren't completely sensible or reasonable because you’ve let emotions and circumstance affect them. You may for instance have impulsively quit a job because you had a run-in with your boss, or fell out with a co-worker. It’s decisions like these that can alter the path of your career in unforeseen ways, and potentially take you in new directions.
Are You Actually Ready To Make Sound Career Decisions?
Realistically, making good decisions about your career comes down to how ready you are to make them. Trying to do it without actually being ready can lead to bad choices and unfortunate outcomes. If any of the following applies to you, you probably aren’t ready:
• You’re a natural ditherer who finds it hard to make decisions.
• You don’t want to commit to something now because something better may come along in the future and you don’t want to miss out.
• You’re waiting for that one perfect job to present itself, or you believe you will only have one shot at choosing your perfect job so you’re waiting for it to come along.
• You find yourself being overly influenced (or daunted) by other people who all have ideas about what you should do with your life.
• The motivation to find a career that suits isn’t there so you’re marking time waiting for the ‘right opportunities’ to land in your lap.
• You think enlightenment and direction will hit you like an epiphany and tell you what you need to do.
Know Thyself Before Trying To Make Valid Career Decisions
Ultimately, developing self-awareness is the first step towards making a good career choice. Think about how you make decisions – rationally or instinctively. What do you need, or need to do, to make a good career decision – research, time, support, inspiration, confidence etc? Do you know how to find or get what you need? When you have these, can you make a decision?