What career you choose determines what major you study while in college. It influences what life you can afford and what you spend so much of your time doing each week.
Choosing a career is a big decision to make and high school seniors each year are stressing out about how to go about deciding their future. But deciding a career path doesn't need to be too stressful.
Finding your passion is largely about self-awareness and researching all your options. By following the suggestions below you can decide your future career with ease.
Becoming more self-aware can be especially difficult for younger, high school students who are still figuring out so much about who they are. But this journey into self-exploration can be fun and eye-opening too! You want to discover and record your skills, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and passions.
Start exploring the things you love right now. This is the first part of the journey that leads you to a career you’ll love. You also want to know your values, or what you will and won’t do in a job.
If you have trouble finding these personal answers within yourself, there are some things you can do to find the answers.
Giving yourself an introspective interview can really help learn more about yourself. Questions are good because they help you analyze yourself and what you do and don’t like. It also helps you look at yourself more realistically. You may like the idea of being a lawyer, but you have to ask yourself if you are willing to do all that is necessary to become a lawyer, and if you'll really be happy with the required daily tasks of a lawyer.
Questions help you see patterns and become more self-aware, which is paramount to finding a career path for you. They also help you to know what you would like in a job (so you can accumulate a list of options) and what you wouldn't like in a job (so you can cancel certain options out).
To conduct your introspective interview you can ask yourself the following questions, or you can have someone else ask them while you respond and talk about your answers together.
There are lots of online career tests you can take. A career quiz will give you ideas about what fields and jobs might be right for you.
You'll be asked questions to determine your skills and interests. Then the test will pair your results with careers that best fit your answers. You can then weigh these different options and research them to help you pick one. Below are two free tests you can take right now:
After you have some options in mind you can learn about your choices in order to make an informed final decision. Don’t only research specific jobs though. This can be really helpful, but think about broader fields of work as well.
There are fields of work and then there are jobs in those fields. Sometimes deciding a field of work first will help you find the specific job you're looking for.
They also list the skills that are most important to the field, the tasks and requirements involved, how people review the job, gender percentages in the field, and the health benefits you generally get. It’ll even show you related jobs and jobs in your area and it’s all shown to you in pretty, simple graphics.
Internships and job shadowing can be a great way to get some hands-on experience with the careers you're interested in. Often your school advisors can help you find internships and job shadowing opportunities near you.
Now that you have a couple of choices in mind, and have done your due diligence learning all about each one, you have to make a final decision. When making this final decision about your future, it's important that you keep certain things in mind.
Think about the future, retirement, the family life you want. Think about what you would like your life to be known for and any other long-term goals you may have for your life. Will this career choice help you reach those goals?
Make sure you take priority over what you want to do over any societal expectations pressed upon you. After all, you are the one who’s going to live with this career.
If you’re graduating high school and starting college soon, then you’ll want to not only pick a college but a major and possibly minors that will be useful for the field you want to go into.
You can also start taking advantage of high school and college advisors and mentors if your school has a program like that. These counselors can act as career coaches to help you map out your career path.
In your research and studies, you should figure out the steps, milestones, and requirements that people in your field must go through. Then you can plan these steps out in your own life.
