Looking For Advice On Changing Career?

Here’s How To Use This Site To Help You

This page offers you help and advice on changing career by guiding you through how to make the most of this website.

The buttons on the navigation bar on the left are the links to guide you through the career change process and they follow in a fairly logical sequence. You don’t have to go through exactly in order, but there is a natural flow to them.

In each section you will find a range of ideas and exercises you can do. Try at least a few in each area but don’t feel you have to do them all. Some will probably appeal to you more that others so go with what appeals initially. You might like to come back and try some of the others as a way of encouraging yourself to ‘think outside the box’ – always a good idea when considering career change!

Make sure you identify what you learn from doing these exercises. After each one, stop and make a note of your answers to these questions:

• What insights have I gained from doing this exercise?
• What (if anything) has surprised me about what I have uncovered?
• What new possibilities do the results suggest that I could put in my Career Ideas Log?

Read on for the advice on changing career that you will find at each stage.

Where to Begin

Before you dive into the career change process, it is a good idea to stop and take stock of what is behind your decision to tackle job or career change.

What is your attitude to the whole process? Will you enter it with an open and positive mindset? Are you ready to put in the time and effort needed for a significant and potentially life-changing project?

There is some good advice on changing career here that will set you off on the right foot.

Where Am I?

You need to learn from the past if you are to move forward effectively. This page offers advice on changing career through reflecting on what you have already done.

There will be many clues for you about what is right for you and what you know now that you want to avoid. The things that have gone well for you in the past as well as the low points can be a great source of information to help your career search.

Who Am I?

The essence of a successful career change is taking the time to develop your self awareness. Too many of us are so busy that we never stop to take stock.

Here are a range of exercises that will help you work out what makes you tick. You can explore areas like skills, values and interests. Then you can use the results to identify what will be the best career choices for you at this point in your life.

Career Personality

One of the key factors that will influence your choice of career is your personality and it is often overlooked by people who are reviewing their career direction.

Here is a simple personality test based on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. It will help you to assess what kinds of work will suit you and which areas might be better to avoid.

What Do I Want?

It may be helpful to know more about yourself, but have you ever stopped to ask yourself ’what do I really want?’ Getting career change right is about allowing yourself to explore what really fires you up and inspires you.

Take the chance to dream about what the perfect career would be for you if you could create it. This will give you some great clues about the direction you should be looking in.

Career Tests

Many people think that taking some kind of career change aptitude test will give them a magic answer to their career change dilemmas. They can be a useful additional source of information and advice on changing career, but will not usually give you an instant solution.

Find out more about what these tests are about and how they can play a part in the overall career planning process.

Career Ideas

Once you have spent time exploring yourself and your motivation for career change, you need to pull the ideas together and make sense of what your research is telling you.

This page will suggest ways that you can identify the key themes for your new career direction that you can now investigate in more detail.

Career Research

It’s not enough to just analyse yourself, you need to look outwards to the world of work out there too.

This is another aspect of the career change process that is often skimmed over. We tend to focus on what we already know, what is familiar.

My advice on changing career here is to encourage you to once again open your mind and use a wide range of sources of information for your career research. You’ll be amazed at how much you can find out about the career possibilities you are considering if you really throw your research net widely.

How to Decide

Decision making is not easy, but deciding on new career ideas will be a lot simpler now you have done your research - both looking inwards at yourself and outwards at the career opportunities.

Here I offer you are range of decision making tools to help you weigh up the options using both rational and intuitive processes.

Taking Action

This is the point at which you turn all your thinking and planning into action. After all, the bottom line with career change is that you actually do it, rather than just thinking about it.

Here’s how you can get yourself organised and define some clear and achievable action steps so that your career change idea is turned into reality.

Hopefully these guidelines will enable you to make the most of this site.

This website is an ongoing project and I am adding to these pages all the time. So do check back regularly for more advice on changing career.

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