Are you feeling a bit lost or at sea with your career choices, still unsure of what it really is you want to do? Read more about how to identify your true purpose and use it to drive you towards a career you love.
Choices, Choices …
‘The world is your oyster’, they say, ‘You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it’, ‘Reach for the stars’. As well-meaning as these platitudes may be, they can be quite unhelpful when you are looking for some practical advice and career guidance in a real world that is full of a choices and decisions at every turn. Fear not, you are most certainly not alone and help is at hand to steer you in the right direction. Here at FindMyWhy we have created a personal purpose project specifically to provide you with greater insight into you as an individual, helping you to secure that dream job or career.
The Job Market: Past & Present
The job market is a place of rapid change, where new jobs, whole careers even, are born in response to technology and our changing environment. There are students at universities across the land studying for jobs that don’t even exist yet. The fastest growing industry in the UK, financial technology, is an entirely new industry, yet according to job board Monster there are 1.64 million digital technology jobs available at present. These are 21st century jobs; they did not exist 20 years ago.
If we go back even 50 years, job prospects and career choices were far more limited, fewer school leavers entered into tertiary education (with only 1 in 8 school leavers going onto university in the late 1970s compared to 1 in 3 now) and once people were in a job, they tended to stay in it for a much longer period, often seeing out the bulk of their careers in just one or two companies.
Fast forward to the present day and the job market is a transient affair, with employees changing jobs and moving industries more frequently. It’s not just the jobs that are different but the way that people are employed, with zero hours contracts, freelancing and self-employment becoming more and more popular to support the gig economy, and more people than ever before having numerous jobs in parallel rather than a sole career.
What Do You Want To Be ‘When You Grow Up’?
It’s the question we were all asked as children. But for some (and more people than you’d expect!), the answer remains all too elusive. Unless you have clear career aspirations and know exactly the direction in which you want to go, it’s all too easy to be overwhelmed by choice, baffled by the myriad of options available. The more choices there are, the harder it becomes to focus on one clear path. We face information overload; there is an endless stream of job boards, job adverts and recruitment websites all filled with thousands of possible vacancies. That’s not to mention your own social media platforms and personal profiles that may influence your job search with head-hunters and recruiters reaching out to you with new opportunities.
Wherever you are in your life journey, whether it’s as a recent graduate, or having gone through a life changing experience and redirecting your efforts, or simply knowing you want something more from your job – clarifying what it is that you actually want is a real challenge. As is so often the case in times of need, you may look to friends and family, to life gurus and to career experts for advice, but what we often don’t do is look inwards at ourselves, digging deep to find our unique skills and values, deciphering our work preferences so that we find a career that really compliments our natural skills and abilities. Yes, family members and friends know us well, but they are not always best placed to provide career advice of any real value. They know what you were like as a child and adolescent, what you are like in the mornings, your school history and friendship groups, and your strengths, likes and dislikes broadly speaking. But do they really know the career you? Do they have any insight to your professional persona, what makes you tick at work, your aspirations, your inner dreams? Perhaps not, and you may even struggle to verbalise these things or commit them to paper.
Identifying Your Personal Purpose: FindMyWhy
FindMyWhy is a personal purpose project designed specifically to guide you towards identifying and securing that dream job or career. FindMyWhy starts as an online psychometric test and results in tailored reports providing valued insight into you in your personal and professional life. It will help you to clearly articulate your greatest strengths and your core values, giving meaning and purpose to the decisions you make. You will see how you are unique and how to shine, what motivates you – and what doesn’t, helping you to identify your core goals and carve a pathway to getting there. With FindMyWhy, you will get to know yourself better than you ever have before, seeing yourself in a new light and seeing how others perceive you – often the biggest surprise of all.
You will receive access to free bespoke toolkits and professional resources, all of which are fully mobile and tablet enabled, meaning you can access them anywhere anytime. And you can download all the documents to keep forever. You can visit our website to learn more and see testimonials from others who have already tried it and loved it. So, rather than take another stab in the dark, use FindMyWhy to take the guess work out of your career decisions and take the first step towards true fulfilment at work. www.findmywhy.com