Learn How To Identify Your Career Interests
Not sure about your career interests? In my last post we looked at how personality plays a very important role in identifying the career areas that may be a really good fit for us, but of course there also needs to be interest.
Over the years I have met many clients who will say that they don’t know what career interests they have. My instinctive reaction to this claim is that I don’t believe them. Of course they are not lying to me but I certainly believe that deep down each of us knows more than we might imagine.
Rather than not knowing, I think for most people it can be more about not understanding how to find answers or where to even begin.
Another common complaint that clients present with is that they can’t find a job. Of course, I will always ask what the person is doing to find work and typically the responses involve various combinations of trawling through jobs and recruitment websites, newspapers and so on.
What are you looking for?
The response to this important question is all too frequently met with “I’m not sure”. Obviously, this is a huge problem, and without meaning to sound too clichéd here; how can you find what you’re looking for if you don’t know what that is!?
So what does it really mean to be interested in a career? On the one hand that seems like a very straightforward and simplistic question; on the other hand, it can feel for many like one of life’s most unsolvable problems.
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Love What You Do?
Careers interest has been a challenging consideration for literally thousands of years!
In the 2nd Century BC, Patanjali, founder of the Yoga Sutras had this to say: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, and all your thoughts break your bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be”.
There is certainly a lot to take in in that statement so at this point I would encourage you to pause for a moment and take some time to read it again and to really consider what it has to say about the value of having a genuine interest in, if not a passion for, your work.
I have my own take on it of course, and I think the short and very simplistic version is that the best predictor of success is a love of what you do.
This I believe is good advice but there can be an assumption that each of us knows what that is. The reality is that many people would say that they don’t and worse still, they don’t know how to work it out.
Added to that, it is not just as simple as “doing something you love” as there are real life constraints that can affect us all to the point that some careers are not always realistic choices and at the very least there needs to be compromise.
While I would like to tell any individual to follow their dreams and never give up, I also know that there are practical realities that exist in all our lives.
Career development can be influenced by a variety of factors such as finances, location, personal and family commitments among other considerations. With this in mind, there is an important balance to be found between what we want on one hand; and what’s possible on the other.
How To Find What Interests You
And so to personal responsibility. The last post mentioned that personal responsibility is important in the sense that it is up to each of us to make careers decisions for ourselves as this will ensure more meaningful outcomes.
Most people in my experience are trying to answer the wrong question though and spend a lot of time focusing on “what do I want to be?”. I think this is much too narrow a focus and instead, I think the more pertinent question is “what am I interested in?”. Once this has been established you can look more closely at specific roles within your areas of interest, therefore, your career interests.
So how can this be worked out? In the first instance, it is of real value to apply structure and focus to your thinking around careers and career development and I have some suggestions as to how you might do that.
There are numerous tools that I use to help clients gain some focus and ultimately some insight into what career areas and job roles that would be a good fit. To get you started, here is a useful free online tool and an exercise from Stanford University that will help to get you thinking in the right direction.
For the most part, these assessments are very straightforward and in part they are basic. I say this as a positive though as the decision you are trying to make is complex enough without adding to that complexity.
In undertaking these assessments, the desired outcome is to identify themes and broad areas of interest rather than specific job roles.
Remember this is a process and a broad understanding of your interests is more than enough for now.
The next post will look more specifically at how our skills, and our work and personal values can and indeed should influence career development.
In the meantime, good luck with your job hunt!
About the Author
Shay Nolan is a Careers Advisor at University College Cork. With a vast wealth of experience in working with undergraduate and postgraduate students in relation to career development and employability issues.
He has designed and delivered careers workshops that have focussed on career planning, CV and Interview preparation, personal branding, skills development etc.
He regularly facilitates career development programmes for researchers in UCC as well as for administrative staff in the university. In addition, he is the Careers Advisor for students with a disability in the UCC Disability Support Service and can provide specialist support in this area.
Outside of UCC, he operates his own private practice meeting a broad spectrum of clients from Leaving Cert students to experienced professionals looking for a career change.