Is Your Career Tuned to You?

They are happy with the same situation where people resign themselves to their fates and remain frustrated. It’s all a matter of defining your career goals, being flexible about them and aligning yourself to reality rather than allow reality to overwhelm you.

When the economy is a continuous state of flux, it seems only natural to move from place to place to find economic equilibrium. But sometimes job seeking can also become a habit that people follow compulsively. This is not good. The first thing any job seeker should do is to define his or her personal priorities and career goals, create a flexible career plan with both short term and long term elements and then set targets to be achieved. Some things you can do before taking a jump in your career include:

• Study your lifestyle: Find out what you are happy with and what makes you unhappy. What you would like things to be realistically and within your means? Can you achieve such a position and status if you keep doing what you are? If the answer is yes, then consolidate yourself, if the answer is no then expand into new territories.
• Study your strengths and weaknesses: Are your skills sufficient to reach your goals or do you need to enhance them? What are your key strengths? Is your career plan built upon your key strengths? If not, then it is time to realign your career plan and make it realistic.
• Study yourself: What are your likes and dislikes? Which social stereotype do you fit most closely? Do you need to overhaul your personality to fit your career goals? It is essential for you to ask these questions, find the answers, and act upon them.
• Study your present: Your present is your starting point. Study it deeply and plan your future with available resources.

To do any realistic career planning that is not involved with immediate survival, it is good to set four to five-year targets.

The things you need to do first include:

• Studying employment trends in your field of work and find how much future trends support your career goals.
• Studying the skills of people who are already in the position you aspire to be. Do you possess the same skill sets or do you need to improve? Include both work related skills and social interaction skills on your list when you make any assessment.
• Networking and directly learning from people whom you feel have reached the goals you want to reach. See if you can find a mentor.

Only realistic planning can see your career goals realized and stop that endless running. You need to define targets and achieve them. Do not flounder about blindly and go with the tide. Keep in mind, you can’t control the tide, but surely you can ride it. Taking a deeper look at yourself and your career goals will let you do just that.