There’s one thing you must know about before you choose a career: yourself. Until now, the chances are that you’ve never really had to sit down and look at the kind of person you are, but that is the crucial step you must now take to help you make the right decision. There’s no shortage of people who discover late in life that the job they’ve been doing for years might be perfect for someone, but it’s not them.
The first thing you need to find out about yourself is what your values are. What’s important to you? What triggers your interest and holds it? What do you care about? On a blank sheet of paper, write down the answers. You’ll end up with a list that tells you a huge amount about the values that are central to you, an indispensable document in deciding where to focus your energies in your working life.
Next, on another blank sheet of paper, write down what you’re good at. Everybody has a talent for something. A career involves developing a huge range of skills, most of which you might not even have the beginnings of yet, but talents are skills that you already have in-built. Your talents can help you decide which direction to take in planning your career, because if you have a talent for something you’re by definition better at it than most people, so you already have a head-start, and the odds are that you enjoy it as well.
Next, identify your preferences. Are you outgoing? Do you like being part of a team or are you happier working on your own? What kind of tasks do you enjoy most – physical, verbal, mathematical, creative, manual, organisational? Do you make decisions on the basis of facts or with intuition? List the tasks you have really enjoyed, whether it’s organising a disco, running long-distance or dissecting rats. These preferences can be difficult parts of your character to pull out, but it’s worth the effort, because they will give you key pointers to the kind of person you are and the kind of work that will provide you with the most stimulation and the greatest reward. And the answers to each of these questions could open up new possibilities.
