Deciding on a Career

Whether you’re at the beginning of your career, and trying to narrow down your options to help you pick some helpful GCSEs or A-Levels options, or more established and trying to help a young relative find their direction, you’ll rapidly discover that this is no easy task.

Today we’re trying to provide a little guidance to help you decide if you should be aiming yourself at Criminal Justice jobs, brain surgery or computer programming.

Reflection

To decide what you really want to do, you’re going to need to engage in some earnest self-reflection. This is worthwhile if you’re fourteen and trying to pick GCSEs or forty and questioning the direction your life has taken you.

You need to think about three things: what you enjoy, what you value and what you consider ‘success’ to be for you personally.

If you enjoy creating things, and you value freedom, for example, a successful career for you is one that gives you the maximum autonomy by letting support yourself with your creative talents. The specifics of that are going to differ based on what you actually love to do. If you’re a budding photographer, you could find a balance of supporting yourself with commercial work like wedding photography and using that those high paying to pursue more creative and rewarding work in your downtime, for instance.

On the other hand if what you value is security, more so than stimulation, it makes sense to seek a secure job in tech companies. The civil service, for example, offers a career path that could see you happily ensconced for a lifetime. It’s a broad enough church that it has space for almost any skillset, so whether you have a mathematical frame of mind, or are more of a researcher, you’ll likely be able to find a home there. This comes with a suit of benefits like a generous holiday allowance and a nigh legendary pension, so while you’ll have to work hard to excel and rise through the ranks, you’ll be rewarded with the secure position you crave.

It’s this motivation that’s the most important of the three, as it will be the engine of your achievement throughout your career, so take the time and think hard about what makes you want to strive, what you’re really looking for in life, and if you have the self knowledge to find it, you’ll be able to shape a career round that will really reward you.