Although you often would like to start your personal career development efforts at the implementation phase, it is critical to start with a proper assessment of your career values, interests, skills, and style. Career satisfaction depends on how compatible your career is with your values, professional interests, skills and work or management style.
Identify and Prioritize Career Values
The importance of aligning your values with your professional interests can not be overemphasized as it directly correlates to your job satisfaction. Each person is different and each circumstance is unique. Most of your career values are acquired early in life and some of them change as you face new issues and challenges. Most forty-year olds today are engaged in occupations that were chosen when they were twenty. Find out what career values you hold at this point in time.
Determine and Synchronize Career Interests
Career values represent strong principles that are associated with specific jobs, career interests are mostly apparent in the basic tasks or organizational environments that attract you to some occupations and deter you from others. There are number of standardized instruments available to assess career interests but if those are not available you can simply review a list of career options.
Remember, the fact that a career is attractive does not mean it is the ideal job or you should seek that job, it could simply mean that there are some elements of the job that are of interest and should be considered.
Detect Highly Motivated Skills
While you probably have spent some time examining how competent you are in using certain skills, you may have not considered a second dimension of skills – how motivated are you to actually use them.
Since your skills are the primary reason a potential employer will hire you, it is important to spend some time analyzing them. You may not be able to use all your motivated skills in your next position, but you may use them at home or in volunteer activities.
Beware of “burnout skills”. Those are skills that you are good at, probably have been rewarded for by past managers, but you hate using them. The more you have to use your burnout skills in your next job the closer you come to quitting your job rather sooner than later.
Assess Work or Management Style
While most mangers say they hire people because of their skills, in reality, much of the hiring decision rests in how well you fit the work environment. “We just clicked” is a rationale for hiring based on personal work style.
Consider your work style preferences, how do you approach conflict, challenges and projects. Is your preferred approach emotional, analytical, action oriented or creative? Consult past coworkers, friends and family to give you an additional perspective.
Personality and work style are generally well-embedded characteristics that rarely change over a lifetime.
Once you assessed your values and career interests, you can begin to specify and explore a variety of career options, build your network and learn about how to effectively employ your contact list.
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