How to go about Choosing your Career

Choosing your career is a crucial step as it involves your entire future career prospects. Often, it is observed that a large number of students are unaware of what they want to be. This confusion amounts to aimlessness and can be compared to a situation like boarding a train without knowing one’s destination. Undoubtedly, it may result in waste of your precious time, efforts as well as money, resulting in repentance, disappointment and frustration.

This underscores the need for exploring the various career options available and their suitability with reference to your career dreams, qualifications, interests, strengths and weaknesses, career growth potential in proposed career option. It is important because setting an unattainable goal would prove incoherent.


The following guidelines, in this regard, may prove useful:


·Ideally, the choice of a career should be an individual’s own decision because it is the individual who will face the consequences. Any kind of pressure, be it parental or from the peer side, can prove detrimental to his or her interests.

· An ideal career for you would be the one which ensure a perfect match between your interests, aptitude, abilities and the requirements of the profession; besides giving you job satisfaction both in terms of work and returns. In no case, choice of career should be based on misleading aspirations.

· The right choice of a career begins with a dream. A dream is where you want to see yourself one day. It could be flying an aerospace , performing a complex surgery, leading an international company, to be a top class engineer, biotechnologist, film actor, model, singer, musician, ad man and so on. A Chinese proverb says, “People who don’t have dreams, don’t have much.”

· Creams help us to have a goal. If we go through the success stories of the people who reached the pinnacles of success and analyze the secrets behind their exemplary achievements in life, one common thing they all share is to have a goal. In this sense, your dream, turning into a goal, will define the direction for action.

· To realize your dream and achieve your goal you have to plan your career as early as possible. Postponing this essential activity could cause delay in fulfilling your career aspiration.

· The biggest advantage of career planning is that you get on to the job choosing your career in the right earnest – one of the essential conditions for making a meticulous decision. You get focused.

· Secondly, in the process of career planning you may come across several viable option that you may not have even dreams of. For this purpose, you have to go through relevant information in the form of career literature i.e. newspapers, magazines, internet, TV, etc., consulting your parents, teachers, seniors, career counselors or knowledgeable and experienced persons.