How to Find Your Ideal Career
Wondering how to find your ideal career? Here are some smart brainstorming tips to help you identify your dream job based on your best natural talents.
July 5th, 2010 by Becky Turner
Finding your ideal career can
be an exhausting lifelong search |
If you're looking to find your ideal career, then I take it you are unhappy in your work right now - and that is a whole pile of wrong.
As adults, our career can define us. A successful career boosts our ego and makes us feel like we have a useful purpose in life. A dull, lifeless career makes us feel frustrated as we waste energy doing something we resent.
When your career is going well, your whole life seems pretty good, boosting how you feel about yourself, your relationships, your finances - everything. But when your career is failing, it can bring down every part of your life.
Finding and fulfilling your dream career may be a complex part of your personal development but it is certainly worth the time and effort. If you are putting up with a miserable job and living from paycheck to paycheck, at some point you have to ask: what is this actually doing for me...?
A Life Purpose
While it would be pretty sad to say your career is your whole life, you can't ignore the sheer amount of time you spend working, day in, day out. For most people, a career takes up 30-50 hours per week - that's an awful lot of time to spend doing something you don't care about.
So it's fair to say that your job is an important part of who you are. It gives you a life purpose. So your dream career should be derived from the activities that make you feel good about life. Instead of looking at a bunch of job descriptions and trying to pick out appealing elements - look at it from the opposite angle. Think about your natural talents and interests first and then combine these to create the ideal job. Even if you think it doesn't exist, or can't imagine such a career being within your reach. Those are just self-imposed limits and we overcome them by simply ignoring them :)
To identify your dream career, write a list of all your talents, interests and personality traits. Don't stop until you've utterly exhausted every possibility. This should take at least 20 minutes if you do it properly. Then flag the items that must form part of your ideal career, as opposed to aspects that would be nice but are not essential to your career happiness.
My must-have list looks like this:
- creative communication
- independence from a manager
- opportunities to learn and evolve
- interesting subject matter
- flexible working hours
- ability to work from home
Don't write anything about money. This task is designed to identify your top passions and needs and create a career out of them. There is absolutely no point in pursuing a job for the money, when the day-to-day work is going to make you miserable. It will quickly get old.
Once you have your list of career needs, you can start to match them to different types of jobs. You may be surprised at the new career opportunities that this kind of brainstorming can produce.
The Million Dollar Experiment
Here's another interesting way to help you find your ideal career without getting hung up on money. This is what Pete poses to his friends whenever they are feeling fed up with the day job.
Uncle Horace was an
eccentric old fool |
Imagine your eccentric wealthy relative has died and left you a whopping great inheritance - one million dollars every year for the rest of your life. But there is a snag. Crazy old Uncle Horace will only deposit the funds at the end of each month after you've done an honest month's work. He doesn't care what you do. In fact, due to another extraordinary loophole, you won't even get paid for this job. You have to work full-time for free, knowing that you'll receive the princely sum of $83,333 each month from Horace. Tax free - this is fantasy land, after all.
So what would you do? You can pursue any career you want, as long as you create some value for the rest of the world. Your finances are sound. Anything you like. Don't hold back. And don't try to find loopholes, either. That's not the point of the experiment, you swine!
Ask your friends this same question and brainstorm your ideas together. This can be a very revealing thought-experiment that enables you to find your dream job without censoring your ideas.
Don't Be Afraid to Churn
Now that you've done a little brainstorming, there are a few things I've discovered when it comes to finding your ideal career.
In the five years after leaving school, I switched through five different jobs. I think the main reason was because I got bored after learning the ropes. With every job, I developed a depressingly predictable six-month itch. Time after time I realized my new job wasn't going to make me happy in the long term. It just wasn't my ideal career.
Some people would say this is totally reckless - that no-one wants to hire you if your CV looks a complete mess. If that were true, I would have been stuffed a long time ago. But these days you can get away with a lot of churn. You really don't have to waste months or years doing a job you resent just to prove you have stickability on your CV.
Indeed, the US Department of Labor estimates that today's learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38. Around 1 in 4 workers have been with their current employer for less than a year - and 1 in 2 for less than five years. Check out this inspiring video for more shocking career stats.
The truth is, switching through a number of different jobs is really not a bad thing. In fact, it is entirely necessary (unless you are exceptionally lucky) in order to actually find your ideal career.
For this reason I strongly recommend against studying extensively for any career in which you have no experience. Of course, there are many professions which demand university degrees - so your best bet is to get as much hands-on work experience as you can before you commit to the training. I have seen a number of people spend years studying all sorts of degrees, only to take a completely different route on entering "the real world" and still have no idea what their ideal career might be. It's a sad realization that everything you studied for is effectively useless.
I'm not knocking the experience of going to university itself, which I'm sure many people have found extremely valuable. But when it comes to identifying your dream career, a three-year degree for the sake of it can be an expensive, time-consuming, and above all fruitless course of action.
Your Ideal Career Will Evolve
It's quite important to understand that your ideal career will probably evolve over the years. It's very unlikely that the 20-year-old you will have the same career or life aspirations as the 60-year-old you.
What did you want to be when you were a child? I recall wanting to be an astronaut for a long time. It seemed fun and unusual and you got to float around in space! How cool is that!?
By the time I was a teenager, I realized that being an astronaut was a completely irrational choice (for me, anyway). I then went through phases of wanting to be a photographer, a writer, a psychologist and a mathematician. I had some ambitious ideas, but like just about all teenagers, I was very confused about my job options.
So after a lot of thrashing about in my 20s I finally found my dream job - freelance writing. I certainly enjoy it in the context of writing my own websites about my passions. But I have plenty of other interests and so perhaps, in my 30s, I will pursue something else entirely. It may be one of my other passions - science, dogs or graphic design - or something new entirely. Perhaps by the time I'm 50 I will be doing a job that I can't even conceive of right now, because our technology is evolving so rapidly. (This is actually very likely for all of us.)
What I'm saying is, though I have found my ideal job for now, the concept of a "dream job" is entirely relative to your life outlook. We all change and grow as people, with different priorities and hobbies as we age.
Why shouldn't fundamental changes in our personality impact on our career choices? The concept of a dream job is way more fluid than that.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to understanding how to find your ideal career, I realize this article barely scratches the surface. This is a very detailed process that you'll need to experience independently. But I hope I've given you some good chewy food for thought. Above all, I want to convey that:
- Your career is closely tied to your ego and self esteem
- Your ideal career gives you a life purpose
- Your dream job should not be dictated by salary
- You must choose your career consciously
- You may have to try many jobs before you find your dream career
- Your idea of a dream job will change as you develop as a person
If your current career is not deeply fulfilling then I suggest you start brainstorming your next career move - today. Be truthful with yourself and your abilities and don't waste time copying anyone else's career path or taking their misguided advice. Only you know what activities and goals will make you happy each day. And only you can make them happen.
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