As discussed in the blog 3 Steps To Find The Right Career, there are six key questions you need to ask yourself to discover your dream job.
They are:
1. What are my values?
2. What is my career vision?
3. What are the skills I most enjoy using?
4. What are my unique strengths?
5. What topics or fields fascinate me? (This informs the sector or field you should work in)
6. What are my practical expectations from a job (e.g. salary, company culture)?
This article explains what these questions are all about, why they matter and offer tips for getting started.
So let’s get into it.
1 . What are my values?
“Values” are a fancy way of saying “what matters to you in life”.
They are literally “what you value”.
Some examples of values could be:
Family, connecting with others, empathy, freedom, impact, recognition, meaning, fairness, equality, stability, adventure, fun, self-discovery, learning, challenge, competition, credibility, integrity.
The list could go on! But hopefully you get the idea.
When we honour our values, we feel alive and fulfilled.
After all, they are what we value most of all and think is important in life.
Conversely, if we’re unable to honour our values for some reason, or worse, our values are being actively trodden on or antagonised – we're likely to feel de-energised and unfulfilled.
So when it comes to choosing a career, it’s important to ask yourself:
“Will this type of career allow me to honour my values? Or will it antagonise them?”
Imagine that you value equality but work for a company that doesn’t care about diversity or inclusion.
Or imagine that you value your family but work 90-hour weeks and never get to see them.
Or imagine that you value connecting with others but don’t work in a team and don't face into clients or customers.
These types of roles will actively antagonise your values and make you feel unfulfilled – a recipe for disaster.
So it’s vitally important that you become consciously aware of your values, so you can avoid roles like this, and instead choose roles where you can honour (at least some of) your values.
2. What is my career vision?
This question is all about stepping back and thinking big for a moment.
When you’re retired, what do you want to be able to say about your career?
Is there anything specific that you want to have achieved?
Is there a particular impact you want to have had, or problems you want to have solved?
What needs to have happened in your career for you to be able to say you were “successful”?
It's all too easy to drift through one’s career without really thinking about these sorts of questions.
Of course, if you don’t, the risk is that you reach retirement and wonder whether you used your 90,000 hours (the average length of a career) as wisely as you might.
To avoid this scenario, try transporting yourself into the future, looking back on your career in its totality and answering the above questions.
As you start to answer them, you may well find your career vision is very hazy.
This is totally normal.
The good news is that even a hazy vision can offer valuable clues about what the right path is for yourself and can help you make better career decisions in the short-term.
3. What are the skills I most enjoy using?
In order to really enjoy your job, it follows that the skills you use day-in day-out should be skills you enjoy using.
However good you might be at “analysing data”, for example, if you don’t enjoy doing it, it shouldn’t be one of the key skills of your dream job.
Just imagine – every time you need to analyse data will feel like an uphill struggle and will drain your energy levels. Hardly a dream job!
In contrast, a skill that you love using, even if you’re not yet a master at it, would be much a better choice.
Why?
Because you’ll naturally be drawn to using it. It won’t feel like an uphill struggle.
And just as the adage goes - “practice makes perfect”, it’s only a matter of time before you enhance your skill level.
4. What are my unique strengths?
It may be helpful to think of your strengths as “innate talents” – things that come naturally to you.
That could be, for example, your ability to think logically, or your eye for detail, or your ability to win others over.
The latest research shows that individuals who play to their strengths at work are six times more likely to be engaged on the job and also perform better.
So it makes sense to uncover exactly what your strengths are.
Identifying our strengths, however, can be a lot easier said than done.
Why?
Truthfully, because we take a lot of our strengths for granted.
We assume “everyone finds it easy”, when on most occasions that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you want to identify your strengths, you need to get external perspectives.
Ask a friend or a colleague what they think you’re particularly good at, or complete a personality test.
This one’s great by the way: https://www.16personalities.com/
5. What topics or fields fascinate me?
All too often, people go into jobs where they care little for the subject matter of the work.
They work for a food production company, but don’t really care about the food products.
Or they work for an energy company, but energy as a topic doesn’t really stimulate them.
The result?
It feels like something is missing.
Like they’re missing a “passion” or “joy” for what they do.
Perhaps you can relate to this.
Now, am I saying that you have to love what your company does to get a level of satisfaction from your work?
Absolutely not.
If your job honours your values, uses your favourite skills and plays to your strengths – chances are, it’s going to be a pretty enjoyable job!
But, working in a sector or field that really stimulates you is a way to get even more satisfaction out of work.
And what’s more, if you’re fascinated by the subject matter, you’re more likely to go the extra mile at work.
For example, you’ll find it easy to keep up with industry news, because you’re genuinely interested in it.
Which in turn makes you even better at your job!
So, the question is:
What topics deeply fascinate you?
This will help inform the sector or field that you should be working in.
6. What are my practical expectations from a job?
What do you expect from your job in terms of:
· Salary
· Location of work
· Working hours
· Working conditions
· Organisational size
· Your colleagues
· Your manager
· The company culture
· Job security
Though these factors might seem a bit boring in comparison to your values or strengths, in fact they are vitally important and determine a lot of your day-to-day happiness.
Uncovering what you ideally want for each of these factors can also help you to envisage what your actual day-to-day would look like in your ideal job.
In summary
There are six key questions you need to ask yourself to find the career that is truly right for you.
Once you have answers to all these questions, you’ll have created what we (at my 90,000) call a “dream job description”.
If you did this job, you’d be energised, happy, fulfilled, motivated, and then some!
Equipped with this dream job description, it also becomes much easier to evaluate which real-life jobs and careers are for you, because you have clarity on what you ideally want.
Chances are, no job or career idea can quite live up to your dream job description. And that’s to be expected. After all, it is your dream job.
But, there will be a few career options that are an 80% or 90% match.
These are the types of career you should pursue!