Archive for December 2011
Making Career Decisions – Part 1
The brand new Year is traditionally a period for new beginnings, new goals and resolutions. And for some, you’re ready to be considering a new job.
Why are a lot of us unhappy at work? There are probably as numerous reasons because there are unhappy people, but there are a few underlying factors which influence a lot of us. Think back to your school days and the careers advice you had been distributed by teachers, advisors and your parents. Just how useful was it?
My very own memories are of a 30 minutes session with a teacher in the age of 14, after i said I wanted to be a nurse, because it was the first thing that arrived to my head, influenced by my parents’ opinions. After i was 18, I’d another 30 minutes session with the same teacher, who expected me still to be planning for a career in nursing. That which was your experience?
Parents often influence their children by trying to live their own dreams through their offspring, particularly if their kids have similar talents to their own. This may work when the children share their parents’ dreams, but that isn’t forever the situation.
Another common scenario occurs when parents are worried for their children’s financial security and encourage them to “do something sensible”, by getting employment within an area where there will always be a demand, or where tasks are still considered “for life”.
It can be hard to go against parents’ wishes, especially if they have provided support, either financial or in the type of board and lodging, when you were at college. Some families have strong traditions in a particular field – everyone in our family does medicine or teaching, for example. Have you feel pushed into a career by your family?
How can a 14 years old, or an 18 year old for that matter, know what she or he wants to do for the next Half a century? In fact, how can anyone know they want to follow a particular career, if they’ve never used it? The solution, of course, is that they can not be sure – at least not one 100 % sure. So, whether you are only starting out or contemplating work change, it’s a good idea to test your new job before committing yourself to years of training.
Obviously, it isn’t always possible to try out precisely what you’d be doing. No-one is going to let you perform surgical procedures or defend an alleged bank robber if you haven’t got the training and experience. Which means you must do the next best thing. This can vary based on the career under consideration, however the aim is to find out around it is possible to before signing up for an expensive course of study.
There are many steps you can take: to begin with, read everything you can find concerning the job, including careers leaflets, books and relevant websites. If afterward you are still interested, two of the most important steps you can take are: getting as close to the job as possible and speaking with people already doing the work.
Work experience and work shadowing are usually only offered to students, but that’s pointless to reject the possibility if you’re older. Contact the HR department of the company which specialises in the region which interests you and explain that you’re planning for a change of career and would like to find out more about the job. Ask if it is possible to spend time with them gaining experience or shadowing a professional. Alternatively, inquire if it would be possible to satisfy someone doing the job or maybe the company has open days.
In some cases, if you have experience, say in administration or computing, it may be worth taking into consideration applying for a brief job within the organisation that will help you reach a decision. This can at least provide you with an insider’s look at the career, even if you can’t experience it top notch.
In other situations, volunteering would be a great way to find out such a job involves, for example if you wish to be considered a surgeon, working on a hospital ward like a volunteer provides you with a look into medicine and bring you into connection with doctors and medical students.
If you can to volunteer on the reasonable period of time – it does not have to be a full-time commitment, just a regular one – you’re going to get to understand people and, in the example above, you may eventually become in a position to observe an operation.
No-one can ever guarantee that a career choice would be the right one and also you mustn’t forget that your interests will change over time. So be ready to change careers at some stage. However, if you do your quest thoroughly, you’ll have a much greater possibility of finding a job you actually enjoy.
What Career Counselors Don’t Tell You
They educate you on Your Resume building, Interview techniques, Brainstorming techniques, and may be many things. Right; they’re experts in their respective fields.
There are things they do not teach you
It’s brainstorming, a few days in front of your actual interview, I am talking about. I have not come across anyone using this simple but effective technique which hardens your level of confidence but without telling you so.
It is simple. Let’s say you take tips from whether counselor or a friend. Almost all of them simply take tips and are available back. You now would accept me, that you simply knew many of those tips already. Well, nothing is lost. You can open a discussion by what you already knew. This brings about the weak points and flaws, if you had any.
Repeat the same with new tips too. It helps you realize more by removing misconceptions, or if you had not heard clearly etc.
Compare different options for all tips. This is actually the closing round individuals brainstorming. Being an ending, summarize the strong points that evolved. They are your techniques for a good interview.
The Basic Idea
Just notice that it went on so casually that you simply forgot you had been actually using a scientific technique. I am not advocating an informal approach but about feeling better. One is positive about circumstances like his/her known environment, when s/he is strong because etc.
Get going confidently, simply by preparing the easy way.
The important thing To Career Planning Is Asking: What is My IDEAL Situation?
It’s not easy to find your ideal job, even though you scour job boards and the classifieds and camp in work planning office.
But it is possible to get precisely what you want.
Seminar participants would listen to my introductions and marvel that my credentials were a perfect match for what I had been doing.
This wasn’t accidental. I didn’t stumble upon my career, nor was I recruited into it.
I devised it, developed it.
Before my imagination arrived, it simply didn’t exist.
I decided to depart college teaching; that’s by the semester and year, and teach, nonetheless, but each day.
Instead of being indentured, or is that tenured, or certainly tethered to 1 school, I’d spread my insights to as numerous campuses that would have me, and also at the peak of my itinerant duties, that number reached forty.
Teaching through Training I earned ten times the money I got from as being a conventional faculty member, inside the first eighteen months, and I didn’t think back.
Driving as much as one of my former professor’s homes in my new Mercedes convertible, he asked, in genuine perplexity: “Where did all of this come from?”
It came from asking a simple, but crucial career planning question:
“What would be an IDEAL situation for me personally?”
The solution was teaching in circumstances by which teachers are paid well.
That answer stimulated me to complete just a little arithmetic and also to determine that being paid $500 per day, which in no way was exorbitant, would be a lot better than being paid $13,400 each year.
Regardless of what you’ve seen within the movies, nobody will walk your decision and whisper inside your ear an enchanting word, for example “plastics” or “The Internet” and hang you on your way to a better profession.
You have to IMAGINE what would be ideal for you, after which ask if that position has already been created.
Career Advice: Success Requires Control over Change
Change is certain and constant. Benjamin Franklin could have been wise to add
“change” to his adage that “death and taxes are the only certainties of life.”
We are inundated every single day with new relationships, new ways to do things, new
expectations and new information. The total of knowledge doubles every five
years. It has been estimated that 75 percent of current workers will require
retraining through the year 2010; today’s high school graduates must be prepared
to change jobs or careers at least 10 times within their lifetimes.
The way in which each of us handles change bears a direct correlation with our career
success.
We can resist change – deny its existence, continue doing things within the very same
ways because that’s the way we’ve always done them. Then we is going to be buried with
another relics of the past, completed in by what the writer Alvin Toffler termed, “Future
Shock.”
We can merely accept change and accompany the planet it creates for us. If so,
we will dance on cue to whatever tune the fiddler chooses to experience.
BECOME A real estate agent OF CHANGE
Or we can notice that change is inevitable and embrace it. We are able to become
agents of change, therefore we have a hand in shaping the environment by which we live
as well as in determining our own success.
The choice is apparent: be content to stay with the old and familiar, accepting
the idea that a known environment is worth being left behind as the
world marches on.
In order to accept change, we must realize that success isn’t finally achieved.
Mountain climbers have a saying, “You never conquer a mountain. You get up on the
summit a few moments, then the wind blows your footprints away.”
Peter Drucker, the main management guru, declares, ” … success always means
organizing for that abandonment of what has already been achieved. There is no
more difficult challenge.”
This means to try new and unfamiliar ideas, untested ground, unthinkable thoughts.
That is uncomfortable, but always exciting territory. However it could be dangerous.
However, enjoy it or not, that’s where the gold is to be found.
Machiavelli wrote in The Prince in the early 1500′s: “There is nothing harder
to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or even more uncertain in the success, than to
move forward in the introduction of the new order of things, because the innovator has
for enemies all those who’ve done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm
defenders in those who may do well under the new.”
George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Progress is impossible without change; and those who
cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
Becoming an agent of change and a beneficiary requires flexibility and imagination, as
well as courage.
CHANGE AND AMBIGUITY ARE HANDMAIDENS
But many of all, to prosper in a changing environment mandates that we have the ability to
thrive in ambiguity, because uncertainty is the constant handmaiden of change.
Change and ambiguity go against the grain of human instinct; many people simply
can’t tolerate that condition. They want everything in order and ready answers for
all queries. Unfortunately, that is not the character of organizations in flux.
The successful careerists will recognize this truth and find out that uncertainties offer
the opportunity for answers and for leadership. Positive about their abilities and the
future, they will seize as soon as.
No one ever said hello could be easy. But common sense informs us that people don’t have any
choice about the fact that change – at an ever increasing pace – is a sure bet. We
also know that unless we change ourselves and produce about alternation in the
organization where we live and work there might be no progress.