With your career prospects brimming with opportunity and excitement at the end of a spell in education and low-level jobs, choosing your ultimate path in the world of work can be difficult, simply due to the choice. You’ll have skills and know-how in a number of areas of work, and you’ll be an attractive candidate for a wide range of employers. This article lends advice on how to narrow down those options, and how to be ambitious in working towards the most fulfilling career out there for you as an individual.
Concentrate on Strengths
Your strengths are those qualities that you feel most distinctly pluck you from the crowd as a great candidate for any job. They’re also a reflection of what you’re most passionate about, and what you most enjoy doing. Therefore, focusing on your strengths – and especially on those things that you love to do well – is an important first step to take when considering what you’ll spend the majority of your life working on.
The options are limitless, but with a list of strengths, you’ll be better placed to make some of the decisions you’ll need to take to position yourself with fewer options and a shortlist of the glitziest and most exciting job roles to work towards.
Work on Weaknesses
Strengths are important in showing you where you’re doing good and diligent work, but it’s your weaknesses where you may wish to concentrate slightly more energy. Weaknesses can include natural deficiencies – such as dyslexia or other forms of natural underperformance – or they can simply be areas of expertise that you feel you haven’t developed all that well in your first few years in employment. Common weaknesses, according to employers, include:
- A lack of good people skills and verbal communication
- IT illiteracy for those who’ve not grown up with complex computer programs
- Poor organization skills and bad time-keeping
- A lack of creativity and problem-solving capacities
These weaknesses, amongst others, aren’t elements of your professional life that you can simply allow to wither away through neglect. They’re universal skills: they’re skills you need in all walks of life, and so if you feel you’re running low on one or more of the above, it’s time to push yourself into situations where you’ll be challenged – situations outside your comfort zone – in order to attain better-developed business and workplace skills.
Specialized Skills
Finally, in the realm of skills, there are plenty of jobs that require specific qualifications for you to be considered by the hiring officials and executives. If you don’t have that all-important degree, master’s certificate, or PhD, you’re going to be left wanting when it comes to the most exciting and high-level roles.
This can be frustrating because gaining one of these jobs is withheld from anyone who doesn’t have the required skills. But thrown into another light, this is your primary opportunity to set yourself apart from the crowd by actually going out there to gain important and impressive qualifications that’ll lead you to greater jobs at higher ranks that if you entered the industry at the lowest, entry-level. If you’re looking to enter the police force, for instance, a bachelor of policing will be the perfect qualification to have up your sleeve. It’s a degree you can study online as well as in-person – perfect for those who need flexibility in their learning life.
Make Use of Your Network
Even the most introverted and shy individual has a network. If you think about all the people you’ve met over the course of your life, you’ll discover that school friends, colleagues, classmates in university and neighborhood friends are all out there in impressive roles and careers. These individuals might be utterly perfect in helping you get the job of your dreams – all you’ll need to do is extend a friendly message and see whether they can do anything to help you.
Never forget that when you approach your network with a problem, they may well take that problem to their network too, thus massively expanding the potential for them to find you the perfect person who can help you. The advice here is to be active on LinkedIn – the professional social network that helps business professionals meet, share, and help one another. It’s the perfect platform to help you narrow down and select that dream career.
Job Hunting
Now, you have so many great skills to take to the job market, and you’re confident that you want to work in a certain industry. It’s now time to take to the job websites and listings to search and scour them for any opportunities that’ll help you progress in your career. With a selection of keywords in your head, you’ll quickly unearth the most important and exciting jobs for you to focus on – and from there you’ll be able to start making applications.
Of course, job applications are often a challenge in themselves – and can frequently mean editing your resume and cover letter in order to align them with the job that you’re applying for. That’s no bother, of course – it’s just the final bit of acrobatics you’ll need to perform, jumping through the final hoop – in order for your application to sparkle with intrigue and professionalism when it comes to be read.
Interview
Now that you’ve concentrated on building so many skills, gaining qualifications and networking your heart out, the interview stage of your job hunt will be a walk in the park. You’ll be supremely confident about your own knowledge and knowhow, you’ll have plenty of advice from your network, and you’ll even know about the variety of jobs out there at the moment for which you might be interested in applying. This puts you in a powerful position when it comes to interviews – you’re someone that people are interested in talking to, someone informed, excited, and passionate about starting their dream career.
These tips are designed to help you find your calling in life, refining those skills that are most important while also taking the time to gain qualifications that’ll truly matter on your path to a fulfilling career.
