Let’s face it; not everybody knows what they want to do with their life. While there’s still a long time to decide where you want go, here are some very helpful tips to steer you onto the right route.
1. Follow a career path you are passionate about
Firstly, and perhaps more importantly than any other point on this list, it’s vital to choose a job you feel passionately about – or rather, perhaps more to the point - you know you have the potential to care about.
Not everyone grows up wanting to be an SEO specialist, but if you’re someone who has a strong interest in data analysis, computers and an investigative mind, you might find you can develop a real passion for the role.
If you’re a computer whizz, but don’t possess any of those qualities, it might not be worth your time even looking into a career in that sector. The key here is to find something you either already care a lot about, or could potentially see yourself becoming dedicated to in the future.
Likewise, not everyone grows up wanting to be an engineer, especially girls. There is a great demand for engineers in general in the industry and great push towards encouraging girls to get involved with engineering. For more information on how you could become an engineer, visit our Engineering Apprenticeships page.
If you’re unsure what certain jobs offer when it comes to these sort of characteristics, make sure to do some background research and find out what they entail. You don’t want to start a new career, only to discover on day one you hate what you’re doing.
2. Think about your location and lifestyle
You can care enough about a certain job-type to carry out your tasks to a top quality standard, but if the lifestyle you’re leading as a result of that isn’t one you enjoy, once again it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good.
Different professions require vastly contrasting attitudes towards your leisure time – with you needing to make a decision very early over whether or not you’re willing to make sacrifices in regards to accommodating your profession.
Along that frame of thinking, it’s crucial to fit your personality type into your chosen career path. If you’re someone who likes keeping to themselves, then it might be best for you to stick to a job where working from home or independently is viable.
If you’re more sociable and enjoy the chatter of an office environment, your best bet would be to try and find a career which sees you constantly interacting with people as part of your role.
Location geographically is also important to consider. You might be offered your dream job, but if it means uprooting your life it might not be worth it. If you’re someone who can’t deal with mass upheaval, look for a career which is plentiful across your county or region.
3. Know your strengths
It’s nigh-on impossible to forge a legitimate career out of something you can’t actually do to an efficient standard. If you’re pursuing a future in a certain sector, make sure you have the ability to carry out the tasks that’ll be required of you in that department.
The fantastic thing about skills is that they are, for the most part, relatively versatile traits. If you’re a talented technician, you can generally turn your hand to working on any piece of tech. If you’re a good writer, all it takes is a little research and you’ll sound like an expert on the most random of things within hours.
Find what you are best at and make sure you work on and utilise that talent to its fullest. By harnessing your skills to their maximum, you help to make yourself stand out from a crowd of people who are potentially pursuing the same field of work.
If you feel like you don’t have a skill, you’re wrong. Everyone has one, but some are just a little harder to discover than others. To really pinpoint what it is you are good at, take a look at some of the things you enjoy (and are talented at) as a hobby. You’d be surprised how often your personal and business qualities will overlap.
However, just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to necessarily follow a set career path – after all, you might hate your talent. Though it does make thinking about your future job just that little bit easier.
4. Setting Financial Goals
Lastly, it’s also very important to set yourself financial goals of where you’re looking to be within a certain period of time. These will naturally be impossible (or rather, improbable) to intricately follow, but they give you a rough idea of where you’ll want to be and how long it’ll take to get there.
In truth, this step is for the most part something of an overthought – with it arguably a detriment to start planning how much salary you want to be earning before you even know exactly where you want to be going with your life.
That said, if you’re accustomed to living a certain sort of way – or have ambitions to live a lavish lifestyle in the future –making sure you’re aiming for a profession which pays big bucks is certainly not something that should be overlooked.
Most people are happy to start out at the bottom and work their way up to a decent salary over time – but if you’re someone who is driven by money (for whatever reason), then plotting out a career path which accommodates your desires may be a worthwhile step.
These are just four useful tips which could see making the path to your future career that little bit easier. There’s no set way to fully prepare for the future – with all sorts of unforeseen hurdles set to spring up over your life. However, if you follow the advice we lay out here, we promise it will be considerably easier to plan and plot your profession as you head into the ‘real world’.
