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Find Your Dream Career with These 7 Questions
As a prospective student, choosing your career pathway can be a decision filled with excitement and anticipation. You will receive countless offers of advice from family and friends to find your dream career. Finding a job that you are passionate about, with great long-term prospects, is important.
When it comes down to it, there are a number of questions that you can ask to narrow down your options. Reflect on your current motivations, skill set and work style. For instance, TAFE courses are an excellent pathway and well-suited to a hands-on career.
At Kangan Institute, we want to help you find your dream career, so we have compiled seven powerful questions to get you started.
1. What opportunities excite me and why?
When you talk about your passion, you tend to focus primarily on what you enjoy doing. Does this sound like you? Where there is great value in understanding the general direction, it is useful to understand exactly why you are interested.
Students who would like to pursue a creative career may be more excited by the prospect of working with fabric than paint. This will help you to decide which industry is most relevant to you.
If a placement is more exciting than a formal lecture, then TAFE courses could be the right pathway to finding your dream career. Ask yourself why you are drawn to certain aspects of the occupation and this will give you a clear picture of the next step.
2. What do you love to do on a Saturday?
Self-reflection is a great approach to establishing what your dream career looks like. This will be easier if you have a friend or family member with you to listen. Make a careful note of the activities, places and events that you are passionate about.
To get started, fill in the blanks here: “If I had a free Saturday that had to be spent ‘working’ on something, I’d choose ___________ because ___________ .”
3. What do I want to become really good at?
Consider what you would like to specialise in further down the track. Success and fulfilment are closely related to your quality of work. Focus on the specific skill set that you would like to develop rather than an occupation.
This will allow you to find your dream career without being limited by position titles. It will also help you to place your interest in a new context and become familiar with the day-to-day responsibilities you would like to undertake.
4. What am I willing to compromise on?
Have you successfully identified your passion but aren’t sure how to pursue it? There are a number of tradeoffs that are important to consider to find your dream career. Are you available to commute to work? Is this a traditional industry or new and fast-paced?
Take into account the aspects of any previous job that made it great. To decide on the right career and the best study pathway to achieve this, you will need to understand what is non-negotiable and what you can be flexible on.
Be completely honest with yourself about what will make you happy or stretch you too far. This can be a great opportunity to sit down with a careers counsellor for the best graduate career advice.
5. Who do I consider to be my mentors?
Throughout your networking endeavours, you might have come across a few professionals who work in your dream career. These individuals represent our own hopes and future aspirations, so this can be a telling question.
Reach out to your mentor to ask for advice and tips. They will be able to tell you what the career is really like and establish if this is the right pathway for you. Give yourself the opportunity to discover what life is really like in the working world.
6. How do I like to work?
Do you prefer a more practical approach to learning? If you like to work with your hands, then a career in a trade or occupation might be best suited to you. A pre-apprenticeship can be undertaken on a full or part-time basis. Enrolling in a pre-apprenticeship is a fantastic stepping stone to start a career in a trade.
For particular sectors, TAFE courses can be beneficial. Typically with a hands-on focus, there is a wide range of course options in the VET sector that can provide you with the workplace skills and training to achieve success.
Do you visualise your career to be outdoors or on the road? In your local community or overseas? An employer will value employees who are passionate about their work and willing to go above and beyond.
7. Where do I want to work
Do you want to secure a job within a metro community or regional setting? Interstate or overseas? The job market and potential will differ from place to place. It’s important that you can ask yourself this question as early as possible.
For some prospective students, It will be a big commitment to travel for study and eventually for work. However, there are still fantastic opportunities to experience a different culture and become comfortable with change.
At Kangan Institute, we offer a range of TAFE courses at a number of different campuses.
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