Find Your Career Path

How do you decide which career path is best suited to you?
The process begins with the self-assessment of your core interests, personality traits, skills, values, and beliefs. These are extremely important variables in the decision-making process as they reflect your innermost needs and desires. More importantly, they will lead you to favour particular occupational fields over others.

Self-assessment will lead to the generation of a list of potential career options which you can begin to explore. Researching these options will allow you to identify the most suitable careers based on your particular priorities as well as other important information such as education and training required to enter into the field, job tasks and salary potential to name just a few. Careers which survive this analysis can then be put on your preferred career list. Of course, in examining this list, you will want to focus on those career options which you are most likely to be successful at achieving given your present situation and your personal profile.

Next you will want to create an action plan which identifies the follow-up steps to achieve the career options you identified. This action plan will include assessing your educational coursework, summer and regular work experiences, volunteer knowledge and skills you may have acquired which could benefit your eventual career objectives. At points along the way, you will want to assess your progress to verify that you are on track to meeting your objectives. You will also want to verify that you still value your chosen career goal. If not, you can always go back a few steps in the career planning process; choose an alternate career option and redefine your path with the revised steps to get to your new objective. It's not unusual for students to go through this type of problem-solving method to identify their ideal career goal and to change their career objective a few times in the process. It's time well spent. Ultimately, your eventual career satisfaction will be the proof that all the work you have invested in your career planning has, in fact, paid off.

Download our Career Planning Guide for the proper steps to take in the career planning process. Career Planning Guide