How to get the career you want – What do you want?
15 September 2016, by Zoe Cunningham
This is the second in my series of posts about how to get the career you want. Step 1 in my infallible all-purpose career plan is to work out what you want to do.
How many of us really know what we want to do? And does anyone have a good way to find out if you don’t?
I have three ways to deal with this.
- Keep trying things. This is how I became Managing Director. I tried lots of different roles, and set reasonably arbitrary goals that I managed to hit. Through this I discovered that I was capable of more than I thought and so I was able to set becoming Managing Director as a big audacious goal.
- Read The Artist’s Way. I came across The Artist’s Way, a book for unblocking creative people, on a recommendation. I didn’t think I was a creative person that needed unblocking, but I like to read books that other people think are good. This book worked to uncover my buried desire to be an actor, a dream that I had given up on 15 years ago because it wasn’t “sensible”.
- Don’t panic! There are plenty of things that you can work on to help your career even if you don’t yet know what you are aiming for. Transferable skills can be critical to success, and can likely be worked on in your current role. Planning, organisation and prioritisation are needed for any work. People skills are deep skills that always reward more study, and are key to any work which involves more than just you. (Hint: all big and important projects will need the help of other people.)
Once you’ve worked out what you want to do, whether you know your ultimate goal (lucky you!) or whether you are taking an intermediary step of trying something or building transferable skills, you need a plan. I cover that in my next blog post.
FollowTags: career, future, goals, planning
Categories: Soft skills