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Choosing a career
Knowing the essentials, steps 1-4
Guide to Career Decision Making
When trying to choose a career or make a decision about further study, you should
- know yourself
- know your options
- know how you usually make decisions
- know what influences, and perhaps blocks, your decision making
To see a diagram of this model of decision making click here
You already know you need to make a decision so
Step 1 is to clarify what you know about yourself. You might consider your skills, interests, values, and, if your decision involves more learning, your preferred learning style Interests are what you enjoy doing; skills are what you do well; and values are what motivate you to work. Your learning style is how you prefer to learn.
In terms of your career journey, interests tell you what direction to pursue; skills tell you how long it will take to get there; and values tell you whether or not the journey is worth taking.
Step 2 is to explore the options and see how what you know about yourself fits them, eliminating the options that don't. This helps you draw up a short list of ideas that you want to decide about. It may involve both expanding and contracting the list of ideas over a period of time as you get more information and experience to fill the gaps in your knowledge.
Step 3 is to decide what you really want to go for from the short list. To make a good decision at this point and later on, you need to step back a bit and examine your own decision making style - how you typically make decisions - and the advantages and disadvantages of that. We can suggest different methods and tools, but only you can know if they will work for you. If you have a lot of difficulty at this stage you may need to go up a level to...
Step 4 - thinking about what influences your decision making, and sort it out - perhaps with the help of a careers adviser or student counsellor.
Self-Knowledge
The Centre for Employability, Enterprise and Careers (CEEC) is one of the places you can turn to for help in clarifying your self-knowledge. There are many resources available there to help make clear each of the main self-knowledge areas. However, there are also a number of on-line resources which you could try as well, including Prospects Planner an on-line computer-assisted guidance system, to which several of the links on this page go.
Looking at You
A critical part of learning how to make career decisions involves looking at oneself and answering the following questions: (Click on the link to explore each area and see how they relate to possible occupations.)
What sort of work activities am I most interested in?
Identify my work-related interests
What motivates me to work?
Identify the things that get me started and keep me going
What kinds of skills do I have already or need to develop?
Realise the skills I have already and the ones I wish to develop
What else may be important about me and my background?
Discover how to use it to market myself positively
The answers to these questions are important ones because they provide useful information for making career decisions and solving career problems throughout one's life. This self-knowledge helps both expand and narrow the options that we are considering at any given point in life. It brings the picture into clearer focus, but also makes it easier to see the scope of what is within your grasp.
Knowledge of Options
Once you have clarified your self-knowledge, the next step is identifying and increasing your knowledge of options for work or learning available to you. Which of the following statements best meets your needs?
- I want to find out more about postgraduate courses and other learning opportunities
- I want to find out more about work and occupations
- I want to find out more about the graduate labour market
- I want to see how I could use my degree - what graduates in my subject have done in the past
- I want to find out more about working or studying abroad
Knowing How I Make Decisions
If you know yourself and the options open to you, the next step is to make your career decision. To do this, you need to relate your self-knowledge to the knowledge you have gained about your options. But how?
Drawing up the shortlist
If you've used Prospects Planner already, you will have gone some way towards this: the system offers you a systematic way of defining your own interests, skills, and motivations or values and matching these to a list of relevant occupations.
Decision making styles
An important thing to consider is how you have made major decisions in your life so far. If you have successfully made such decisions in the past, the method you used then may apply to your present decision-making ,too. If your past decision making process was not successful, however, you may want to seek out an alternative approach. Click here for some examples.
Decision Making Tools
There are several systematic decision making tools available on the Web, but they may not always suit your style. You can also get help from a Career Planning Workshop on decision learning or career decision making.
Getting More Help
To access more resources or to get help in deciding which resources or methods would work best for you, come to CEEC and speak to a Careers Adviser. They are trained to help people think through the issues in this kind of decision making.
Learning What Influences My Choices and How to Deal With It
Identifying and addressing any barriers to your decision-making about careers or courses is an important part of the entire decision-making process.
Internal barriers
These can be internal and psychological - it is difficult to think clearly when negative thoughts, acting as barriers, interfere with your decision making. To identify and overcome your personal barriers it is important to pay attention to your self-talk, become self-aware, and then remain aware of, and control, your self talk. To do this you may use a process involving identifying, challenging and altering your negative thinking then taking the action needed to implement your career choice. [Example] To get more help, come to CEEC and speak to a Careers Adviser.
Getting more help
If you're finding career decision making particularly difficult, is it also possible that there are other, more immediate, personal issues you may need to sort out first? Could you use some help with this? As well as CEEC, there are counsellors and advisers in Student Services who may be able to offer help.
External problems
Barriers can also be partly due to external pressures and circumstances. If you're desperately short of money, for example, the worry and stress caused by this may make it difficult to concentrate on longer term issues. If you're a mature student, you may need to take the needs of other family members into account, as well as your own. Some groups of people may be unconfident or hesitant about career decision making because their social or cultural background, their gender, race, religion, sexuality, or some physical disability appears to limit their choices in some way.
Getting more help
It can be helpful to talk all this over with a Careers Adviser or personal tutor who may have practical solutions to offer.
