Ram home your career course

A career can be explained as an assortment of life tasks and functions that you indulge in. You do not pursue a career for monetary reasons alone. Your job is one component of your career, with the others being your leisure pursuits to include your hobbies and even unpaid work as also your people and family connections. All these and several other activities that you engage in invariably makes your life profound and purposeful.    

All of us need some goading to jumpstart our careers. It is possible that you are at a job that you love but it simply is not taking you anywhere and you are always wondering where to go next. You could also be planning to make a radical life shift and wanting to move up to unnerve everything. But you cannot take the required decision for various reasons. You could well be at the start-point of your career, in the middle of it or towards the end. There are some queries that you need to direct at yourself to illuminate your career direction. You need to ascertain if your career objectives are in harmony with the following as relevant to you:

· Disposition & make-up: The character of your disposition and make-up is your innate range of penchants and fondness. Your personality outlook could make you loud and liberal or quiet and reclusive. Likewise, you may prefer to conduct yourself in an organised manner rather than going about doing things instinctively or impulsively. Whether or not you permit yourself to be guided by your emotions is also a preference of your personality. The manner in which your disposition and make-up manifest is generally not alterable and cannot change radically. It is not that you cannot modify your disposition and make-up. You can always make them adapt to circumstances, but the fact remains that whatever is intrinsic will always be comfortable to persist with.

· Ideals & beliefs: Your ideals and beliefs signify your individuality and are centred on your ethnic and family sways together with your individual and personality penchants. When people quit jobs, they do so largely on account of differences with ideals and beliefs. These differences could be related to your proclivity to be different from others; inclination to rally round others; and ambition to acquire money and wealth. They could also be linked to your desire to function independently or work in a group; take on a multitude of responsibilities or work on a single task; and preference for a dynamic or easy-going workplace environment. When you take up a job, you sense whether it will be in consonance with the ideals and beliefs that you stand for. Just in case you were not able to sense so, when you exercise your mind to clarify your career direction, you are able to pinpoint that. You are able to make a choice whether to till a new field or simply allow unwanted plants and wildflowers to grow.

· Abilities & dexterities: Any person can develop his abilities, even if he is naturally inclined towards them or not. You need to ruminate about your abilities and dexterities that you want to make use of; and explore career options that call for such skills. There would be many skills that you dreamt of developing, but could not do so for any reason whatsoever.  There is nothing stopping you from doing it now. It is a different matter that developing such skills may not be a source of money generation by itself. But one thing that will happen for certain will be a boost in your self-assuredness and self-improvement. However, such an improvement can stand you in good stead at your work for which you are being compensated. You may also possess several acuities that you have absolutely no inclination to utilise in your career. It is best to not go in for career options that call for such skills because then your line of work will not be your true calling.

· Concerns & appeals: Your concerns and appeals are generally made use to primarily pilot you into your career’s line of work. Evidently, they are excellent guiding light and yardsticks. However as time passes by and people gain experience, they tend to be more cognitive of their concerns and appeals. You need to be explicitly clear about where your interests lie. Making their use to decide upon a career is a good proposition. However, you also need to think through other spheres and matters like your ideals and beliefs that invariably tend to hold out more consequence and import for your future.

The significance of career planning and decision making is applicable throughout your career journey. A re-evaluation of your current position and the direction in which you are moving is a sensible endeavour because it will provide your life with greater purpose, sense and contentment. You have live a life that is in sync with what you actually are. You will be successful in your life and career if you wake up in the morning and go to bed at night; and in the intervening period, do what you really want to do. And unless you learn from the past and realise that it is no longer the key to future, you will not be able to do so.