Advice on Choosing Your Career
You probably are very much concerned about which direction you take in your career, but before working through the process of generating and refining specific career choices, helicopter up to 10,000 feet from where you can view your overall career map, answer the big questions and set your overall direction. What is your aim? How long have you got? Remember that there are no right answers, only the best choice for you, based on what you know now.
Having laid out your overall map, set boundaries and defined your personal targets, you can then turn to practical issues. Write down examples of how you demonstrate key employ ability skills such as team work, leadership, and communication.
Go out and meet people, attend talks, go to relevant lectures, watch videos about industries and organizations, seek out websites that can give you objective and general career advice, for example, the open access Oxford university careers website.
Over time you can start to narrow down your choices and then choose one.
In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off with a compass and direction, and a general destination of mapping the new Louisiana territories in America. But they had no exact map. Your career will be much longer but, like Lewis and Clark, it is about direction, not destination.
A. Where, roughly, are you going?
B. Their successful expedition took two years.
C. In any event, you have a few years to explore.
D. Identify what you are good at, based on your skills and experiences.
E. That way, you'll be more focused and thus more likely to achieve your goal.
F. You are looking for a match to what might suit you now, but that changes over time.
G. Your care er project might take some time, as now you are probably short of information.
