Give yourself a chance to think about what you enjoy, understand your skills, abilities, ideals, and preferences.
Choosing an appropriate career is the need of the hour. A student is expected to go for his/her desirable career once he/she has done high schooling. Multiple career options are available in today’s world but how to choose the best for yourself? What things should one keep in mind before selecting a career option?
Analysis of strengths and weaknesses
The two most important considerations before opting for any career option are strengths and weaknesses. One must analyze these two before selecting any career. Now a question must be coming inside your mind, how to recognize your strengths and weaknesses? So, in this blog, we will be working upon this question, so that you can efficiently choose your career.
One must assess himself/herself before starting job research. This can be done effectively by an approach that is inclusive of personal values, interests, aptitude etc. So, to start with, the following basics are very important:
- SWOT analysis: To assess yourself nothing is better than SWOT analysis. It stands for Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Let us discuss how to go for this self-assessment.
- Take a blank piece of paper and in that paper pen down at least 20 things that you undergo every day. Your values, ethics, thinking, positives, negatives etc. should be written by you. Thereafter, you must categorize all these things according to the four categories mentioned above.
- This can be one way to find your strengths and weaknesses. But don’t consider this as just a piece of formality. You must sincerely complete the entire process and that too in one sitting, no matter how much time this process takes.
- After completing you must take this piece of paper to your parents or teachers/mentors and ask them how to work upon your weaknesses. Once you are aware of the process for eliminating weaknesses out, you must work upon the same so that you can choose a perfect career option and that too with full productivity.
- Various career options: Everything comes with advantages-disadvantages, positives-negatives and strengths-weaknesses and various career options aren’t excluded from this. So, you must be having few careers in your mind, right? For example Engineering, Research etc. Follow the below-mentioned steps to know about your strengths and weaknesses in a better way:
- Firstly, just complete with SWOT analysis if you have not done it yet.
- Done? So, let’s proceed further. Just take another blank paper and write all those career options which you are interested in.
- Now you are having 2 different papers. One of SWOT analysis and another one is of your desired career options. With the help of different sources, for example, the internet or anyone who is working in the same profession just try to find out about the weaknesses and strengths of his/her job and compare them with your weaknesses and strengths. Through this complete process, you’ll be having an idea of whether you are fit for that career choice or not.
- Go through your history: Most of the weaknesses and strengths constantly change with time. But, still, some of them are constant throughout your childhood till you become an adult. So, again get ready with a blank piece of paper. Note down those 10 times or even more when you have screwed something. On the other side of the paper write what you could have done to avoid the same. This will help you to understand your previous mistakes and weaknesses and what could be done to correct them.
- Below are few strengths that one should focus upon to go for a good career:
- Soft skills: These are a combination of various skills like:
- Social skills
- People skills
- Communication skills
- Character/Personality strengths
- Social intelligence.
- Hard skills should also be kept as strengths like bilingual approach, technical literacy etc.
- Apart from soft skills and hard skills other strengths include: Good communicator, Team player, Time management etc.
- One must also have the required strength to work under peer pressure as conditions will not be according to your choices every time because you may face adverse situations like lack of time, emergency conditions etc.
- Some weaknesses like a disorganized attitude, impatient nature, and procrastination must be avoided to choose a good career option as these are very lethal for you.
Key Takeaways
Choosing a good career is not easy. Apart from strengths and weaknesses, one must also focus on various new sectors of careers like artificial intelligence, microtechnology etc. One more thing that is not bad is daydreaming which can also help in improving strength as you’ll be motivated towards your dream and will work hard towards the same.
Also published on Medium.