Whether you want to go ahead and start a home business or do a 180-degree change on your current career path, it is never too late to make changes.
There are many reasons why you may want to consider making a change to your career. Your priorities may have changed, you may have different interests, have new requirements that you need your job to support or want to earn more money, or have more flexibility within your working hours. There are so many reasons.
Before going ahead and jumping into making this big decision, take a moment to assess your current role and see if it can be changed to support your new needs, or if a career change is a right decision.
Why People Change Their Career
There are many reasons behind people wanting to make a change to their careers. Some of the more common reasons relate to wanting to earn more income, create a better work-life balance, change their working hours, reduce their stress, take on a new challenge, or change to a job they are passionate about.
If you find yourself feeling like the above reasons, a change in career could result in a happier work life, feeling more satisfied and less stressed daily.
How To Change Your Career Path
Before deciding to change your career path, you need to understand what it is about your current role that is making you happy. If it is working hours or even income, it might be possible to simply speak with your employer, as they may be able to accommodate making changes to the current contract to support your needs. However, if there is more to the decision, or you cannot have those changes made, you will want to follow this guide.
Understand What Will Give You Job Satisfaction
It is important when making a change to your career that you are mindful of what it is that makes you happy and brings about job satisfaction and what doesn’t. Keeping a journal or a record of what in your current role brings forward these emotions will ensure that you are able to look for jobs that will offer the same benefits and swerve jobs that currently are making you unsatisfied.
Understand What You Are Passionate About
When thinking about changing a career, you want to think about what you are passionate about and what you are enthusiastic about. If you have a passion for trains for example, would you want to look at sales or carry out Injector Repairs? Would that make you happy and satisfied daily? Do you have a passion for animals? Or caring for other people.
Understanding where your passions sit will help you understand the types of work you may want to move into, and that will keep you enthusiastic to work.
Assess Your Skills
One of the biggest parts of job satisfaction comes with being good at what you do. Taking the opportunity to review the roles that you have completed in order to identify what activities and skills you are good at will help you ensure that they are being applied within any new job that you take on.
Get Qualified
If you are taking a complete change within your career, you may be required to gain additional skills or qualifications to enable you to be considered and to apply for certain positions.
It is worth spending time reviewing job applications based on the roles that you would want to move into to understand what skills and qualifications you need. Once these have been identified, you will then be able to build on those in order to add them to your CV.
The luxury of gaining the majority of qualifications is that you tend to be able to work around other commitments and study part-time or at home.
Gain Experience
Before handing in your notice at your current place of employment, where possible, try to gain experience in the line of work you want to enter into. It is easy for the ‘dream job’ to look perfect on paper, however when you are actively in the role, it doesn’t live up to your expectation.
The whole reason behind considering a job change is to make the change and better your work life. Therefore, make sure that you are fully aware of what the role will entail. Speaking to others in the role and completing the experience in the role are the perfect solution to seeing and understanding the full depth of the position.
