Hydraulic cylinders and tipper trucks! My dad has dedicated his 40 years of professional life to those cylinders and trucks. My dad is a mechanical engineer by profession. Most folks from his generation, obtained a traditional degree which took them through a standard career path in a manufacturing or industrial organization. They climbed the job ladder in their place of employment and hardly even considered finding a different firm to even possibly do the same job. The professional landscape has changed significantly in the past couple decades. While the landscape then offered standard jobs with well-defined profiles, traditional career paths and unions that you could reach out to for advice, the landscape today is vastly different. The concept of a few selected mass jobs that most people aspire to has disappeared and is replaced by myriads of job and career options. To fuel this growth, there are colleges and certification programs catering to all these career choices as well!
So how does one know which career choice is right? Here are 4 key factors to consider before making a career choice.
- Strengths Based Approach – The capabilities spectrum for humans is stretched wide.. I strongly believe “anyone can accomplish anything if they put their mind to it”. But advocate a more practical approach as it applies to choosing your career. The foundational element that can make all the difference is going it at from a strengths angle. Identifying and knowing one’s strengths is the key. Play to your strengths and build a career with your strengths as the foundation. If you are not aware of your strengths, look for clues in your life – what skills and talents do friends and family praise you for, what comes naturally to you, what do past performance reviews acknowledge about your strengths are a few ways to determine your strengths. For a more scientific approach, try one of the numerous strengths-based assessments in the market. Strengths 2.0 and Realise2 are 2 popular choices. Again, these give you a good starting point but there is more insight to be garnered from your personal journey.
- Transferable Skills – With the new age trend of people switching firms and careers every few years, it has become necessary to view our career competencies/skills from a different lens. A traditional ladder like moving from an Analyst->Sr.Analyst->Manager->Sr.manager->Director->VP, relies on building on skills from each previous positions. Since this ladder is not as coveted as before, we need to identify transferable skills from each of these positions that can be leveraged on to our next choice. List your skills and competencies without compartmentalizing them into those belonging to a particular career. Instead build your skills repartoire like adding items to a menu of an exotic cuisine – the must haves and the nice to haves.
- Passion with Caution – There is no greater joy than working and living off of your passion. Not everyone is ‘lucky’ enough to do so. Depending on what you are passionate about, there may be ways to monetize and build a career of it. The internet is abuzz with stories of folks making a lucrative living from passions such as knitting and cooking and gardening(options that people would never have considered as a career choice a few decades ago)! The key here is to fathom if your passion is more of a hobby that you like to spend a few hours a week on, or something that you live and breath and think of every moment. The second part to this idea is to also knowing if you are committed to it enough to spend enough time and effort to make this your career.
- Work-Life Balance – For most of us, the majority of one’s day are spent in our work/career. A critical component that we may not consider is the work-life balance. We fail to make this a part of our decision making framework. Understanding the implications of various work situations on work-life balance is critical to ensuring long term fulfillment with a job choice. A career that involves travel may bring significant joy when you are single but could wreak havoc on your personal life when you are married. Long hours may have been tolerable when you were younger but can cause burnout and health issues quickly as the years progress. Understand the implications of your career choice on your life as a part of your decision-making process.
My dad has built his professional life around hydraulic cylinders and I applaud him for that. With the changing nature of our heavily technological-driven landscape,some jobs may not even exist for multiple decades. I recently read an article claiming that jobs that today’s kids will do in 20 years, do not even exist as of today! In keeping with this changing landscape, make an informed career choice with your heart and your mind and watch your career soar!
Have you recently made a career change ?What factors did you consider to make this move?
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