Do you often worry about your future career? Are you struggling to choose the right career path? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. This is such a common dilemma that people go through during, and after university. It can often feel like the wrong choice might irreversibly ruin your career prospects, which is so scary, isn’t it?
The important thing to know first is that the wrong career choice will not ruin your life. There is always another route to success, and sometimes making mistakes is a necessary step to getting the career you truly want. 99% of people make the wrong career choice before they go on to make the right one. It is also important to know that there is no rush. It is OK to feel a little lost right now and it doesn’t mean you won’t succeed. Sometimes you just need a moment to get going in the right direction.
“The journey is never-ending. There is always going to be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what's right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment.” - Antonio Brown
However, it certainly is a good idea to be thinking about your career sooner rather than later. This is so that you can learn how to understand important career factors such as; what your strengths and weaknesses are, which careers could be right for you, and which courses, jobs, and opportunities you might need to move towards to start your journey right.
Luckily, there are some helpful signs that can help you to choose a great start to your career path. These signs are particularly important to pay attention to if you know the career you want could result in you working within a certain industry for many years, or even for life. Let’s take a closer look:
Ever since you were a kid, what were you passionate about? What could you spend time on for hours and hours without even faltering in your interest? Were you always doing mechanics with your dad? Did you always love the gory details in your biology classes? Were you always learning about animals and saw yourself as a bit of a junior Doctor Doolittle? These are all signs of your natural interests and passions and the many jobs around these areas are a rich pool of ideas for your career path.
Consider your perfect job and then think about what it really entails. If you hate paperwork, you might be shocked to find out that many ‘exciting’ jobs like policing or being a doctor involve a huge amount of paperwork. If that is something you cannot do, then that is a deal-breaker.
Do you have strong morals in a certain area? For example, if you’re against the use of animals in science, you could struggle with the learning required for various animal-related jobs because dissection and experimentation are often part of the curriculum. Consider the things you absolutely do not want to do and allow that to help rule out some of your potential career ideas.
Some careers could be common in your area, and some may not, which means you might need to move to actually do the job that you want to do. For example, you live in a rural area with lots of jobs in agriculture, but you want to work in city retail rentals and sales, in which case you cannot stay in your hometown to do the job you love.
It may also be that some jobs naturally require you to be willing to travel or work away for long periods of time. Filmmaking, scientific fieldwork, some engineering work, and many creative industries are great examples of fields that require you to essentially live out of a suitcase at times.
You can learn to do anything you want with the right support and determination. However, if you aren’t sure what you want to do and your strengths are obvious, they could be a really good lead to follow. You could also use your natural strengths to determine which passion job is the right choice for you. For example, you love horses and you’re particularly good with science, so you look into being a vet or a veterinary nurse. If you’re particularly good with people, perhaps you could go into equine therapy or teach people to ride. If you’re particularly good at sports and you love horses, you could go into exercising horses, training them, or professional showjumping.
It is important to have a good, honest understanding of how you are as a person. Are you organized or disorganized? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you enjoy presentations in front of other people, or would you rather work alone and minimize any public speaking? Do you have natural empathy? Are you fantastic at leading? Do your friends say you are amazing at listening?
These are all ways that you naturally navigate your life.
Spend some time noticing your natural ‘ways’ and have friends and family provide some insight too. Once you get an idea of how you are, it will help you to choose a career path that not only ends up in the best career for you but helps you to actively place yourself in the environment that best suits who you are.
For example, if you learn best with your hands or ‘on the job’ an apprenticeship could be a better option compared to classroom-based teaching. If you are very disorganized, you might do best in an entry-level job that already has a lot of structure to it, rather than a position that requires you to organize yourself a lot and to self-motivate. These honest reflections could also help you start to work on the natural personality you have if you strongly desire a career that will make certain traits problematic.
Some jobs are quite readily available, and you won’t have to work too hard to get yourself a position. However, if you have your sights set on a job with high levels of competition, like project management or real estate, you need to be prepared to fight for a position and be the very best in your field. How much ambition do you really have?
Some jobs pay well but they have pay caps or general financial cutbacks. Great examples are public medical services, teaching, and retail jobs with limits on how high the ladder is you can climb. Other jobs, like project management, private medical jobs, and sales can often increase if you’re the best in your field, or if you work for different companies.
It’s important to recognize the top-earning potential in the career you want to go into so that you don’t put time into a job with a financial result that doesn’t meet your needs/ desires. Another important financial consideration should be the cost of living in the area you want to work. The rent in Jumeirah Village Circle in Dubai, for example, is around AED 22,000 a year for studio apartments. Want to work in Palm Jumeirah? You can add a massive 221 percent more per square foot for the privilege.
You also need to think about the difference in pay depending on where you will need to live to work. In the UAE, for example, there is no income tax, which means you keep 100% of what you earn. Move to work in the UK, however, and you have to pay at least 20% of your income if you earn over £12,570 pounds (as of January 2022). As well as taxes, different countries and areas within those countries will have different average wages.
Most people do not know what they want to do when they start or finish school. Most people go on to do jobs that they don’t like and switch careers many times before finding their feet. It’s all life experience and every mistake is a learning curve. Just remember that reflecting on all of the above, all brings you closer to your dream career, which is really, really exciting.
