It’s safe to say everyone who works wants a job they like. Something they feel motivated to do, that pays well and offers meaningful rewards. If finding that sounds like something you want to focus on in 2025, how can you start to figure out the right career for you?
For most people, it takes two major steps to choose a great career path: 1) Understand your own strengths and priorities for a career, and 2) Learn about the career options you could pursue. Let’s explore some essential questions to achieve these steps, and how to find trustworthy answers for them.
Step 1: Understand your strengths and priorities
What are some of your favorite activities? What topics do you enjoy learning about? How do other people describe you? What areas have you developed skills in? What is most important to you in your life, and in how you work? These are the kinds of questions that will help you better identify what will make a job rewarding and meaningful to you.
Career assessments can also help you answer these questions. They will ask questions about your preferences and strengths to identify careers that might fit you the best. CareerOneStop’s three free assessments are a great source:
- Interest Assessment explores how much you enjoy different tasks and activities
- Skills Matcher helps you identify your strongest skills and knowledge
- Work Values Matcher guides you to determine the qualities in a job/workplace that matter most to you
Step 2: Learn about career options you could pursue
Once you have a clear sense of your own strengths and priorities, it’s time to learn about careers. This next set of questions can help guide you to learn essential information about different career options.
- What tasks do people do in this job?
- What does this career pay?
- How much – and what type of – education and training would I need?
- Would this career use my interests and skills?
- How strong is the future job market for this field?
CareerOneStop’s career information will help you answer this set of questions.
- Check out the Occupation Profile to start. You’ll find easy-to-understand information about typical tasks, education, salaries, and more for 900+ different careers. Profiles also feature a career video to see what the job looks like in action.
- Changes in the job market can have an impact on your future career. Take a look at the “What’s Hot” Career Reports to find out which careers in your state are highest-paying, fastest-growing, have the most job openings, employ the largest number of people, and which careers have shrinking numbers of workers.
- To learn about the day-to-day realities of a career that intrigues you, nothing beats talking with people in the field. Questions such as “How could I get into this field, from where I am now?” or “Would I make a good candidate for this role?” and “How would you recommend I improve my qualifications?” are best answered by informational interviews. Learn about informational interviews, including how to set them up and who to ask.
CareerOneStop also offers the How-to Guide: Find career ideas that walks you through these two steps, including a worksheet to record your findings.
Next month, CareerOneStop’s blog will explore education and training options for your career plan.
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