Career Decision Making
The idea of a clearly defined career path and job for life is outdated. Change is now the only certainty in life. The challenge is to manage this constant change.
Imagine yourself 40 years from now.
- Has your career been one which gave you personal satisfaction and played to your strengths and abilities?
- Did you realise your potential?
- Did you forge a path that was rewarding and successful in terms as you personally defined them?
Career is our journey through life; an expression of what is meaningful and important to us. It is more than just our jobs – it is a series of paid and unpaid experiences and can include our roles as student, worker, citizen, parent, spouse and so on.
Career satisfaction usually comes from the interplay between ‘being’ (sense of self) and ‘doing’ (the expression of self).
The Career Decision Making Process
Making the right decisions can determine the direction of our lives.
There are four key steps in the process:
- knowing yourself (what motivates you);
- knowing what’s out there (where the opportunities are);
- making a choice to pursue a particular role;
- Figuring out the steps to reach your goal
Self-awareness is the cornerstone of this process. Being self-aware means knowing yourself and understanding your skills, strengths, abilities, personality, values, motivations and external influences and how they impact on career decisions. Informed choices are usually based on an appreciation of what you can do and what you want to achieve.
The starting point is to know what motivates you and the factors which influence these motivations. This knowledge will enable you to define real meaning and happiness in both your life and work. It will also help you to understand the key information sought by employers and those with opportunities.
Motivation can be broken down into two key facets which mutually influence each other: Internal and External
Central to knowing yourself in relation to both career and personal life are understanding your unique VIPS:
Values: what’s important to you?
Interests: what do you like doing?
Personality: what suits you?
Skills: what you can do?
We are all Very Important People – with skills!
Self-awareness Profiling Tools:
A good starting point in trying to discover your unique VIPS profile is through trying number of self-awareness profiling tools (see our key resources below). The outcomes of these tools can not only assist with career direction but can also provide excellent material for inclusion in your CV and Cover Letter. It is also worth noting that most interview questions will emanate from an understanding of VIPS and how they may relate to roles.
Reflection:
It would be an ideal world if we would all act out of internal motivation. There are, of course, external factors (some posited in the diagram below) which can influence our motivations and indeed decisions to pursue one course of action over another.
Some of these factors can enable and empower us while others may inhibit and hold us back. For example, sometimes we make choices based solely on external influences without reference to our own Values, Interests, Personality and Skills. This could lead to a sense of unfulfillment, possibly resulting in stress and unhappiness. Do you know someone who might be experiencing this kind of stress in their career?
Over to you!
Take some time to reflect on the external factors which influenced your decision to pursue your chosen career.
- In which ways did they influence you – help or hinder?
- Looking ahead, what external factors do you see influencing you – what is your level of control over them?
Becoming aware of the factors which influence your decisions is the first key step to taking control of your career and life journey.
By reflecting on both the internal and external motivating factors and their impact on your decisions, you will begin to develop a deeper understanding of why and how you choose one path over another.
The world is constantly changing and so are we – in undertaking a career journey the journey changes us and we change the journey. Personality will remain relatively constant over time, but values, interests and skills will change and evolve throughout life. What interests you now may not be of interest to you later in your life; you might wish to develop and use new skills; what’s important to you may also change. Likewise, the relative importance and influence of external factors on your decisions may also change e.g. the labour market is constantly changing; the impact and influence of personal relationships will also change.
The interplay of all these motivating factors drives your career and life journey. You need to work to balance them in a way that is meaningful for you. Remember, however, most career and life choices will have some element of compromise e.g. sometimes we are not compatible with certain people or work environment. We often must do things we’d rather not do. If security of work and income are important to you – certain roles in the creative industries may be very challenging from this perspective. The critical thing to reflect on is the point at which you won’t compromise any further.
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Knowing Yourself -Key Resources
|
What Is It? |
|---|---|
| Careers Portal | Careers Portal Interest-Profiler, Personality Self-Assessment, Career Skills Profiler |
| Profiling for Success |
Take the ‘Type Dynamic at Work Indicator’ profiling how personality preferences relate to work environments. |
| Prospects Planner | Career Planning and Job Matching Tools |
| Self Awareness & Psychometric Profiling Tools | Comprehensive Career Development Centre Self Awareness Handout |
There are approximately 10,000 occupational classifications, 2,864 post graduate courses in Ireland, 195 countries in the world to visit and countless business opportunities. Making choices in such a landscape can be confusing.
Taking time to understand your unique VIPS profile helps narrow down the vast array of choices. The next step is to undertake research on occupational areas and opportunities to which you may be drawn.
Your search would ideally include:
- sourcing Occupational Information (see our resources page)
This can be supplemented by:
- arranging Information interviews with people currently working in the careers which interest you
- securing a period of Job Shadowing/work experience to get a clearer picture of what this career involves
- researching the Labour Market to gauge employment trends
It is important to filter the information you gather at this stage by relating it to your own personal internal and external motivating factors. You can then build a picture of where you are now compared to where you want to get to. This is critical to helping you make a well thought out choice.
The following questions might help you in filtering the information you have gathered.
| Internal | External |
|---|---|
| How does it sit with my value system? | Are opportunities very limited? |
| Am I genuinely inerested in the area/role? | Would I have to travel or even move county/country? |
| Does it suit my way of interacting with the world? | Will the role or opportunity meet my needs financially? |
| Am I using the skills I have and like to use? | How will it impact on my lifestyle and relationships? |
Armed with the information about what motivates you and the occupations and opportunities out there, you are now able to make one or a combination of four choices:
- Seek employment or apply for opportunity
- Seek and apply for further study
- Start your own business
- Take time out
If you are faced with a choice between two options, it can be useful to use a decision-making technique e.g. pros/cons; force field analysis.
Now it is very important to:
Set your goals – this/these should be clearly defined e.g. ‘to gain employment as a graphic designer’; ‘to undertake a post graduate course in journalism’; ‘to go for an audition for x programme on TV’; ‘to have a solo show of my work’.
Devise a realistic Action Plan to outline the steps you are going to take to achieve your goal.
Now that you have established your goals and produced your action plan, you are ready to actively pursue your choice(s).
This stage of the career planning process includes:
Opportunity searching and networking
Researching further study options
Seeking information and support around entrepreneurship
Making applications – CVs; cover letters; application forms; self marketing
