Asking "what career is right for me?" is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.
The right career brings you success and happiness.
But if you make a poor decision,
through using information that is too simple or not based on research,
it can damage your prospects, relationships and prosperity for many years to come.
Skills: Your skills are based on your natural aptitudes and developed through training/education.
Values: You may wish to consider factors such as the type of lifestyle you want, your beliefs, and the ethical nature of company or industry you want to work in.
Constraints: Your choice of career might be constrained by financial or geographical limitations, family responsibilities, physical disability or your qualifications/education
Ambitions: You may want to consider if and when you want to start a family and "settle down", whether you want a single job for the rest of your life or have the option to change career, and potential ambitions for setting up your own business. You should also consider what your retirement strategy will be.
Opportunities: Deciding what you want to do is of no use unless there are opportunities for you to pursue. You can find opportunities through various ways, e.g.: responding to advertisements for jobs or vocational training/sponsorship; making unsolicited approaches to organizations to see if there are any vacancies; networking through people you know to get referrals to potential employers; and creating your own business.
Personality: Your personality is a very important factor. It consists of things you know about your self, and your personality preferences which you can discover with our personality.
Most of these criteria are relatively straightforward to take into account. You can often identify your skills, values, ambitions, etc. through reflection or discussion with a career counselor. The area that is more difficult to establish is the match between your personality and the job. This is where our career test can help. We conducted research with 17,000 people into job enjoyment, described in our personality .
This showed that the main factors in job enjoyment were:
1. The degree of difference (or stretch) between the job profile and your unique personality profile (not your personality type). If you have to stretch more, the job is less enjoyable.
2. The nature of the job itself. Irrespective of how well your personality matches the career, some jobs are inherently more enjoyable than others.