Creating career possibilities - #5 areas
If your career feels out of control at the moment then you need to flip this so that you can take more control.
Creating career possibilities for other people, that is when I have the most fun. Not all possibilities will land but having the confidence to explore and sketch out your career ideas - with a bit of time you’ll start to see nuggets or gems emerge. Career plans, even the words side by side can feel a bit too fixed for me. Instead I concentrate on expanding your options rather than feeling like you need to immediately limit them. You don’t always need an absolute plan. Our careers and life are of course inextricably linked and your labyrinth or maze will have lots of twists, turns and dead ends along the way. Embrace it all. You are learning about yourself - what you like, need, all those must have’s and have not’s.
Take a moment. Breathe. This is when you have a chance to suspend your inner critic and trust yourself and see what happens. Sometimes just by letting go and not overthinking, it can free us to have ideas and help those dancing 🌟 emerge. I have the opportunity to work with people from all different career backgrounds who are making active career changes either as a result of redundancy or wanting a career re-set.
Understanding the context of careers is important and having knowledge and awareness about the economic, political, social, occupational and technological factors will allow you to track trends both now and into the future. Prof Inkson et al in Understanding Careers (2014) includes five key areas to consider;
1. Government policies that may impact training and education
2. How technological developments affect the skills needed
3. Appreciating areas of expertise where there may be a shortage or surplus of labour
4. New areas that are developing and how these industries may grow into employment opportunities
5. Occupations that are growing or declining in importance.[1]
Creating your Exploring Toolkit
When you are exploring careers there is not one specific process that you can use to help you to decide what to do. There is an art to it and there are a range of approaches to enable you think through the options available to you. There are five key areas; generator, thinker, creator, discoverer and networker that will all be used to build up your toolkit.
This is why I have created an online course that you can book onto here that takes you through these ideas and so much more.
[1] Inkson, Dries and Arnold (2014) Understanding Careers, Second Edition, Sage Publishing p295
