Simple Tips That Will Help Make The Right Career Decision

Choosing what you’re going to spend your working life doing can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be nearly as overwhelming as we make it out to be. The following will break down some simple tips that can help you make the right career decision.

Understand A Career Isn’t An Endpoint; It’s A Process

When we think of a career, we tend to focus on the end product—the job at the end of a long line of promotions and years of work—but this couldn’t be further from the truth. A career is a collection of different focuses, jobs, projects, and efforts accrued over a lifetime. Something can be part of your career without being your end goal. Your job will change throughout your lifetime. Even if you have the same job from the day you graduate until the day you retire, you can bet that technology and social developments are going to drastically alter what it looks like in that time frame. A career is a collection of hours worked, not the title at the end of a lifetime of work. It’s the entire process.

Know That You Can Change Your Mind

Most of us think when we’re making a choice about what to pursue that we’re locking ourselves into a position from which we can never leave. This couldn’t be further from the truth. At any point, you’re allowed to change your job. At any point, you’re allowed to change your educational program. Let’s say you’re studying linguistics in Massachusetts, and you take a healthcare elective and fall in love with the idea of working in healthcare. You’re allowed to cease the program you’re in and look into a nursing bachelor’s degree in MA. The sooner you realize you’re allowed to quit any job or change direction at any time, the sooner you can let go of the self-imposed, completely false pressure we put on ourselves to figure things out instantly.

Accept That You Will Have Many Jobs

Yes, a select few among us will work the same job their entire life, but this is now an extremely rare occurrence. Most of us will have several jobs throughout our lives. This is normal and maybe even healthier (certainly less boring). The average person will work fifteen jobs in their lifetime, according to recent research. Each job you hold is part of a narrowing down process. Trying things out and making changes until you find the sweet spot—where you want to hang out for the remainder of your working days.

Understand That The Work Isn’t Your Only Considerations

Your work is only a part of your life, yet when we’re young and without direction, people make it out to be the single most important choice we can make. It isn’t. Fulfilling work is a part of overall good life, but it’s only a part.

Ask yourself how your feeling about work would change if it required certain sacrifices. Would you still want that dream job if you had to live somewhere you hated? Would you still want that job if you couldn’t make ends meet because you weren’t being paid enough? Would you still want that job if you realized you weren’t helping anybody but yourself by doing it? If you had to spend the next thirty years sleep-deprived to keep up with the competitive nature of the job? If you had to wear a uniform forever? If you had to be cutthroat to beat out the competition for a promotion? If you couldn’t listen to music while you worked?

Choosing a job also means choosing a lifestyle. Spend time thinking about all the non-work aspects of life that interest you and factor these elements into your decision. You might find the pool of possibilities narrowed remarkably fast when you realize you don’t want to live in the six biggest cities in your country for the rest of your life. Or if you realize that you want the kind of job that doesn’t follow you home.

The above tips should help you in the career decision process. The first few steps involve lifting the pressure from yourself about the choice. None of us make the best decisions when bogged down by stress. When it comes to choosing a career, we need a clear head. This means we need to get rid of all these silly lies we tell ourselves about the decision—how we’ll make one choice and be stuck forever with the result. This isn’t the case at all. Even if you decide with ease, things are going to grow and evolve. Industries rise and fall throughout a person’s lifetime. Technology takes jobs away and creates new ones.

Once the stress has been lifted, think about the life you want to live—not the work you want to be doing—and watch in awe as the list of potential jobs you’d be interested in shrinks into a much more manageable handful of options.