3 Career Questions to Ask Yourself

3 Career Questions to Ask Yourself

Regardless of where you are in your career path, moving forward is always important. According to Forbes, in a bid to find the right career, the average career driven being changes career at least five times in his lifetime. But you don’t have to be counted among the average, with the right questions and answers, you can achieve your career and life goals. Often, choosing the right career path for young professionals is the most difficult in the career journey, especially if the right questions are not asked. And for those who already have a career already but are getting ready to get it going with another career, the right questions will save you from making mistakes that might ruin you.

If you happen to be at that point where you need clarity in terms of your career, I have taken my time to discuss the best questions that you must ask yourself.

1. What do I need to do?

You cannot just wake up in the morning to your career. What is the required path that you have to take? What have other people in this career path done to be where they are today? Are you going to have to quite your office job to achieve it? If you want to be a professional engineer, you have to go to college to study an engineering course, and then you have to be registered to be an Engineer. Depending on the level of expertise you want, you can proceed to doing masters degree, or even doctorate degree. Most people have the misconception of limiting the term ‘career’ to be in the professional field only. This is wrong; being a footballer is a career path. Being a chef, a life coach, gym coach and even starting your own business.

2. Why do I need to do this?

Finding a ‘Why’ in career advancement plan is very important. It is what will keep you moving when all odds seem to be against you. It is quite cool if you end up choosing a career because it is a good paying career, but only if you did it two decades ago. Make sure your ‘Why’ is strong enough. I have seen people choose the wrong career path because in their own words; ‘I can’t be doing something I didn’t study.’ And I have seen people that had to quit their old careers to go back to studying again. It all borders around the reason why they are doing it. A medical Doctor who chose the profession because of the money that he/she will be getting will definitely have no regards for his patient’s health.

3. How do I achieve my career goals?

After deciding on what to do and generating strong reasons as to why you want to do it, you need to know how you can do it. This is where the real work comes to play as it is beyond just planning. To be medical doctor for instance, you will need to have spent at least 8 years studying and doing residency. But will it stop at just being a medical doctor? Do you want to be like Ben Carson? Are you an aspiring entrepreneur and wants to be like Richard Branson? Do you want to be an investor like Warren Buffet? How exactly are you going to achieve this? What are the step by step goals that you have to take to achieve this?

To conclude, in as much as we tend to be emotionally connected to careers that we nursed for a long time, do not be too stubborn to take the answers to these questions for granted. You might discover that in the course of answering these questions that the career that you wanted is not for you after all.