5 Steps You Must Take Before You Change Careers

5 Steps You Must Take Before You Change Careers
Changing career is a big step and to ensure that you make the right career decision, here are five smaller steps you can take first.

1. Make a list of priorities. This should apply to life in general, because your values and principles will help you choose a career which you will feel motivated to achieve and which will ultimately deliver in terms of job satisfaction. So if your values include family, your career should allow you to spend time with your children, parents or whichever family members you are closest to. If looking after the planet is an important consideration for you, you will not want to be involved in a career which damages the environment.

2. Make a list of everything you want from your new career. And be as specific as possible. Let's start with something which is important to everyone - money. Don't just write "a lot of money", write an exact figure, but before you do this, work out why you want that figure. This means making some decisions about the type of lifestyle you want to lead and will also relate to your priorities, as outlined in step one.

Other things you might want from your career could be the opportunity to learn new skills or the chance to travel. You may want to be able to progress up the career ladder, or you may be content to work at a specific level. For example, you may want to work with people. There are many jobs which make this possible, some examples being teaching and nursing, but if you aim for the highest levels in these jobs and become a manager, you will have less contact with the people you initially chose to work with as a nurse or a teacher.

3. Decide what you want to put into your career. In order to get the most from your career, you will want to use your skills and knowledge. Are there specific skills which you have already developed, or know you could develop to a high level? List the skills you really want to use in your career. Teaching is a good example, as it does not limit you to becoming a high school teacher, but is a skill which is needed in just about every profession.

Do you love to write, use certain computer skills, or give advice? Do you enjoy communicating with large numbers of people through speaking at events or do you love talking one on one? Are you knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects or a specialist in a particular field? How could you like to use this knowledge?

4. Bring all of the factors from steps one to three together and create an outline of your ideal job. To recap, this will include your values, the things you want the job to give you and the skills and knowledge you want to bring to your career.

5. Begin to research careers which will fit in with the outline you created in step four.You can do this using the internet to search for general terms such as jobs with people and then narrow down your focus to those which provide the majority of factors on your lists. Or you can go for specific jobs, such as air traffic controller, children's nurse, university professor or recruitment consultant and then see how they measure up against your lists.


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