How to Choose the Best Career Option without Guidance

Selecting a suitable career path is hard. With countless career options available, choosing the best one may not be so straightforward. More difficult is deciding your way forward without any guidance. Not every Indian student has career counsellors at school. Most often, parents are in dark about current and emerging career trends. And taking advice from peers can prove disastrous. If you are encounter such a situation that renders difficult choosing an excellent career option without guidance, follow these steps.

Choosing a Career without A Poking Nose around!

Firstly, I would say consider yourself lucky if you are not being guided by the uncles and aunties of the society. Often parents and others foist what they believe would be the best career without any knowledge or research. This leads to dissatisfaction amoung youth and explains why we have such high unemployment rates in India among young women and men graduating as doctors, engineers and other professionals.

These steps should help you make an excellent decision.

Define Your Financial Objectives

The first step towards choosing the right career begins with defining your financial objectives. Think about what would be your dream lifestyle, with complete honesty. And how much money you would require to attain that lifestyle over a period of years.

Once you know how much that is going to cost, go about finding jobs which can pay matching salaries. Understandably, you cannot expect very high salaries as fresher. Conduct an online search for salaries on websites such as Payscale.com. You can get a fair idea on salaries for any particular profession.

Pro Tip: the earlier you realise that money is the sole objective of choosing a career, the better for you. People who do not work for money are either a) those who have made ton loads of it already, or b) who do not care to / wish to improve their lifestyle.

Discover Your Innate Skills

By innate skills I mean your inbred talent. Every human, regardless of where they are born, gender or economic and social status of the family, has at least one major innate or inborn skill. That is the reason some people excel in their work as chefs, sportspersons, singers and musicians or artists, among others.

Identifying your innate skills means simply finding what you are most passionate about. Never fake a passion just to fit into the broad picture. You might be having some excellent hobby such as playing music or singing, painting pictures of creating buildings from blocks. Or you could be crazy for automobiles and want to build them.

To find your innate skills, find what you enjoy most. And check whether that passion can culminate as a great career. For example, if you love singing or painting, take a matching course. There is no shortage of such courses. Fine-tune your skills and opt for a career. People that develop and use their inborn skills and passion are without exception, are most successful in their career.

Choosing your career path can be as tough as finding your way through a maze!

Find Ongoing Trends

Once your financial objectives are clear and you talents discovered, the next step is finding ongoing trends that can provide wings to your innate skills and help develop them into a professional role. Remember, there is always an ongoing demand for every skill. Demand can surge or drop but these are temporary. Nowadays, digital marketing has excellent scope. If you are so inclined, look for careers in this booming sector.

When you know ongoing trends, it is possible to adapt your skills or acquire matching, newer ones to suit the job market demand. This enables you to practice your passion while offering a wider skill set to employers.

Check Future Scope

Understanding the future scope of your field of interest in extremely important. For example: If there are countless students opting for the same course it would mean that every qualified fresher will be ready for the job market simultaneously. Invariably, this will cause a drop in demand for a career. And you might end up taking a popular course that will have no demand.

High unemployment rate among engineering graduates is a good example that highlights this point. Becoming an engineer is prestigious. But if a degree cannot fetch a good job, it’s a waste of time, effort and money. According to a news report, staggering 94% engineering graduates in India are unemployable. So before you plunge yourself into a field of study you don’t fully understand, find out how the market may look like in 5-10 years for that area.

Reputed Colleges & Universities Only

It is always advisable to choose the right and the most reputed colleges and universities to pursue any course or degree. Though it is impossible for everyone to get into the highest ranked college, it is certainly possible to find out how different colleges fare when it comes to their placements, quality of education, and the quality of alumnus.

Unfortunately, several private universities today have degraded the quality of higher education and are only interested in minting money. Getting a degree or certification from these educational institutes will therefore prove only a waste of time, effort and money. It is best to do a thorough research before selecting your future alma-mater before pursuing a course.

Conclusion

Never choose a career path merely under  pressure from parents or friends. What works for one individual may not work for another. Also, what worked 30 years ago, may not work today. It is also advisable for parents to avoid prodding children to follow a particular career merely because it is prestigious or it used to be. The right career path is one that a student enjoys both while studying and later, when employed. People working in wrong jobs- or jobs they do not like- are the most unhappy individuals everywhere.

Choose your career wisely to lead a good life. 🙂

This post first appeared on the getsetResumes.com Blog