If you’ve been thinking of making a career change for a while, you shouldn’t put it off any longer. Chances are you’ve mulled this over, looked at it from every angle, and managed to come up with the same conclusion – especially if you’re still thinking about it now. Making a career change can be extremely daunting, but hardly anybody was built to stay in the same career forever. Here, we’ll talk about what you can do to make a much needed change this year:
Assess Yourself
You’ll want a new role that suits your personality and your skills, so make sure you use things like self assessment tools and career tests to help you. You could even visit a career counselor to help you understand yourself and suitable roles a little better.
Make A List
You may generate a list of career options through self assessment and career tests. Narrow down your list to 5-10 and focus on the areas of the most interest.
Once you have your list you can begin looking at what it would take to do each one in more detail. You should look carefully at things like job description, educational requirements – for some you may need to do a course, or you may be able to do an internship. For example, you might get lucky with a plumbing program, or you may need to go to college. There are various paths for everybody. Know what your expected earnings would be and ensure they align with the life you’d like to live. Are there advancement opportunities?
You can continue to narrow down your list this way as you get a sense of the best choices for you.
Conduct In Depth Interviews
See if you can find somebody in the career to interview so you can get a more in depth feel for the role. First hand knowledge will always give you a better idea of whether this is for you.
Start Goal Setting
When you finally have one occupation that you’d like to focus on, it’s time to set some goals. Short term goals that can be accomplished fairly quickly – say under a year, and long term goals that could take anywhere from 1-5 years. These should be actionable goals and you should be able to measure your progress as you go. This will help to motivate you.
Identify all potential barriers that could stop you from accomplishing your goals and figure out a way around them too. Be prepared to stay motivated early on.
Save An Emergency Fund
As you do all of this, saving a decent amount of money each week/month will help you to build up an emergency fund should you need to leave your job while you train or follow your new path. The more money you have to support your new endeavor, the better.
Are you ready to make a change this year?