How to Embark on the Career You Want

Your twenties can be a difficult time in shaping your career.  If you are feeling lost, I would hope there is some comfort in knowing that it is OK not to have or know your passion at the start of your career. 

Try not to be put off by having vague rather than clear feelings of what you are aiming for.  Career passions often develop and emerge from experience. 

Try to pay a bit of attention to how you actually spend your time. There are clues in how you spend your time as to what really interests and excites you.  Perhaps you can combine those interests with your skills or qualifications and start to create a picture of what would be a satisfying career for you.

Positive and negative experiences both shape us.  Your confidence can be greatly affected by a disinterested or uninvested manager, by a toxic workplace, by a job that took advantage of you and may have used you up and burned you out.  It can be painful to explore negative experiences but they do provide clues to what you have learned so far. 

By the same token, perhaps there was something that was a profoundly joyful experience, such as an event or moment in school or college that really shaped you and taught you something significant about yourself.  Try tapping back into that joy, and remembering what you learned about yourself in those moments. When did you feel most proud.

Here are some core questions to ask yourself. See if you can come up with anything new that you haven’t considered before. 

In digging a little deeper, it may help to recruit help from someone in your life knows you really well and who you can rely on to help you as you sound things out.

What Am I Interested In

For any job you’ve had, you can ask yourself ‘what about this interests or interested me the most?’  Brainstorm quickly through every job you’ve had, no matter how short or informal they were.  Your answers will start to give you clues about what is satisfying for you in the world of work.  

If your work week is deeply unsatisfying to you, what is your favourite part of the week?  Perhaps there is time with someone you find extremely interesting, a voluntary activity that you love, a hobby or interest that absorbs you and generates your energy like nothing else. 

What have you given up that you used to really enjoy?

What Am I Looking For

Ask yourself some concrete questions: what have you learned from your experiences about what suits you, what you’re good at, what you’re capable of.  From things that went wrong, what have you learned about jobs or environments that may suit you better, or about your responses to stress: being honest and truthful can help you to understand yourself better.

In thinking about the career you want, you may be trying to correct a course.  Try spending a little time thinking about what you are trying to correct and what you have learned about yourself along the way.

Where Are My Opportunities

Have you fully explored the place you are standing right now?  Try to take stock of what you have achieved so far in your life and whether there are opportunities there that you haven’t fully considered.

If you are a college graduate, there may be opportunities such as internships or recruitment drives for graduates that can give you crucial experience in areas you are curious about.  Websites such as www.gradireland.com are tailored to your stage of life and the questions you might have.  The Public Appointments Service graduate recruitment drive is currently open if you could see a place for yourself working for the public or on policy in areas of education, defence, conservation, economics or health.

If you are working, have you taken a close look at management traineeships or mobility schemes that could further your career?  There may be opportunities to try out other roles, to take on additional projects that will stretch your experiences and introduce you to more people. 

What Am I Overlooking

Perhaps you are contemplating jumping from a role that is unsatisfying without fully considering the opportunities it could give you.  Your work could open up access to travel, to transfer, to other branches, to other departments, to training.  Could you open up a conversation with your line manager or or somebody who understands your company (and with whom you have a good rapport) about your hopes and expectations for the future before you decide to leave.

From work or college, there may be a mentor figure who can point you towards opportunities that you haven’t considered or do not know about, or who.  Making contact with a mentor figure or an old lecturer could be a very helpful support to you. 

There may be a friend or someone in your wider circle who is working in an area you are curious about and you would love to know more about how they got there. I’m sure they’d be delighted to tell you all about it.

Try quickly writing up a list of people you know that could take you one step closer to roles you are curious about. Try thinking of opportunities that your company might support you in. You might surprise yourself with an idea you haven’t thought of before.

 What Is Holding Me Back

At the end of the day, what is a career.  It’s a series or work or life roles that you take on over your lifespan.  That learning doesn’t come with a deadline.  You have plenty of time to work this out but the choices that you make are going to influence these roles. 

Value the experiences you’ve had and what they’ve taught you about yourself.  Value what you have learned from setbacks or mistakes.  Try to make considered choices where you have taken time to process these experiences and what they mean to you.  Clarify what you want your next step to be.

A little fear is understandable in the face of change. It’s our way of staying safe.

The truth is that the only way to embark on a career is like anything else: one step at a time.

Imagery sourced from Unsplash with thanks.

Self-Care: Simple Tools that Can Work

I’d like to talk about self-care.  It’s important because if we look after how we physically and emotionally feel, our cognition will also function better and we will be able to think more clearly and make more reasoned decisions.    Self-care is in many ways the core of all good decision making. 

I am going to write today about a number of tools that I have found effective in diagnosing stresses and improving our relationship with ourselves.

Voice the Difficulties

The first step to change is to name the difficulties.  If you write out a typical day hour by hour, you can note where your stress triggers are.  Do they happen during the working day, during the transition from work to home life, during idle hours when dissatisfaction seeps in?

Manage the Manageables

Then draw a large container image. You can see the container as a membrane between yourself and the world. 

I draw three sides of a rectangle that’s open at the top.  Everything you write inside the jar are things you can control.  Everything that is stressing you but that is outside your control goes in the white space outside the jar.

The Container helps you to visualise the membrane between you and circumstances beyond your control

The container helps you to appreciate that there are limits to what is within your control and to visualise what life would be like if you focused your energies on managing the manageables.

The Incredible 5 Point Scale

The Incredible 5 Point Scale is actually a sensory tool developed to help children to emotionally regulate by becoming more aware of the stages and levels of their emotions.  However like many sensory tools, it works well for almost everyone.

To develop your own self-care scale, draw a table.  4 columns, 5 rows :

Example of an Incredible 5 Point Scale Table. Make your own!

And start to fill it in, relating your emotional state of mind to what you do when you are unaware and what you could do instead to move yourself down through the scale to a calmer state.

Reflect on What’s Changed

When developing new coping strategies for yourself, reflect on what you have learned about yourself that you didn’t always know.   Many of us have experienced transformative change during the pandemic and drawn on resources we didn’t know we had.  What’s changed for you?  What new information have you learned about yourself?  Did you discover new coping strategies or new joys in your life?

Make a list for yourself that you can draw on: Things that help you cope.  Be as specific as you can be. Is there a certain TV show, a certain moment in the day or a view you really enjoy? Name it!

Early Warning Signs

What are the warning signs for you when the self-care is slipping?   Are they likely to trigger you into feeling worse?  Make a note of them so that you can recognise when they’re happening. These may be the things that will move you up the 5 Point Scale instead of down

Maintain your Supports

Now that you have named what works for you , keep it in your mind by writing your list of coping strategies somewhere you will find it, like at the back of a work diary.

I like to write it in a gentle way.

I Can Try:

• Keeping a little structure on the week; Getting exercise; Only scheduling two things a day; Sitting in my garden; Drinking water with ice; Making time for play.

Start changing your life by changing your self-care and see if it helps you to identify your stress triggers and make clearer decisions.

Jobseeking: Connect first with yourself, then others

Here’s how I became a Career Counsellor:  I went to see one for advice.  I wasn’t making inroads in my career of choice.  I was sitting opposite the Career Counsellor when I had the realisation: I really want your job.  I sought her advice then and there: how do I do what you do? 

She was interested by my interest in her.  A week later, she rang me.  She’d been contacted by a university promoting distance learning studies in Career Development.  Would I be interested in learning more?  I said yes.

 Two years later and I contacted an Employment Service for advice.  I asked the Manager if she would meet with me and she said yes.  She gave me an hour of her time, even arranged for me to work shadow one of her team for a morning.   I didn’t ask for a job, instead I asked: how do I prepare for working somewhere like this?  

 A few days later, she contacted me that she had heard of a vacancy in a sister service.  I applied and interviewed and I got it: my dream job.

We are all Self Employed

In many ways, employment is temporary.  It is your career that you are in control of.  You are the decision maker.  And the way to take control is to know that you are working for yourself now.  Let people know what you need and give them a chance to respond to it.  Expand your knowledge base by asking for advice.

 Develop your interests to form a new network with a wider reach than the one you have now.  What is the worst that can happen?

Job Seeking Skills are actually Self-Marketing Skills

Self-Marketing means you focus on your employability, not on being employed.  You want to create and sustain your own opportunities in work, learning and life. 

In these COVID times, reaching out can be gentle.  You can sign up for something and quietly attend.  You can make connections in a way that is comfortable for you.

• Keep a structure to your day:  Get up at the same time.  Make space in the day for making connections and give one hour to it every day.  

• Spark your interests: Make a cup of tea and watch a TED talk.   Listen to a podcast.  Sign up for a free webinar from the library.  Enjoy taking the time to know yourself.  Pay attention to what interests you. 

• Control your filter:  fill your social media feed with new content by following employers, magazines or professionals who write about your industry. Follow one and then from their feed pick two more to follow.  Unfollow or hide content you no longer enjoy.

• Know what you’re looking for: write down three knowledge gaps.  Tell yourself: I’m going to do one thing this week that moves me closer to filling one gap.  I’m going to persevere and practice.

• Fill your knowledge gaps: take a new course (I link to free ones below), learn new skills, sign up for a conference, attend a webinar on anything you find interesting.  Use your new sources to generate ideas.  What are other people listening to?

• Make connections: set up a Linked In page and invite people to connect with you on Linked In – say hi on a Zoom chat at a webinar and see what happens!    Look for new opportunities to learn and practice filling those gaps, one step at a time. 

 Don’t keep your jobseeking a secret

 Don’t be scared of networking. What’s now called networking is how Irish people have operated for millennia.  We love a good recommendation from someone we trust before we do anything. People often turn to a family friend or a neighbour to get a leg up.

 So if you have ever posted in a Facebook or WhatsApp group looking for a recommendation or if you have ever replied to one, then you have networked.  It is no more mysterious than that.

 Let someone in your network know you are actively seeking a job. Think about all the people you have worked with or who know you well.  Choose someone who is positioned well to introduce you to others and who is likely to be happy and interested to hear from you.

Be clear about what you want. If it is someone you know, you can let them know you are actively seeking new work and that you are looking for some advice about where there are vacancies or how you would prepare to work somewhere like their work.

Connect with those who are connected with others

Then list potential prospects: list organisations that do what you want to do, and who you could contact there.  Are you more comfortable starting with someone you know or a stranger?  Make it a planned and targeted networking campaign.  

 If it is someone you don’t know, don’t ask for a job.  Ask them for advice.   Ask them for a half hour of their time.  And try to leave that meeting with one more recommendation of someone you could talk to. 

I contacted lots of people at the time I contacted the Employment Service but I only needed one to be the right opportunity.

Make a connection.  First with yourself, then with others.

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