I’m a big believer that career change is a marathon not a sprint but I also understand how time poor mums are. If you do find yourself with a random free hour then here’s how you can put that time to good use.
What you do depends on your starting point.
If you know you want to change career but have no clue what to do next
Take a personality test
I always say that the first step towards changing career is to begin with yourself. What are your interests, skills, motivations and values because it’s likely your current career is out of whack with these?
In less than hour you can take a free personality test like 16 personalities that will give you a freakishly accurate summary of your personality and will even suggest the sorts of careers you might be happy in. Now, I’m not saying you need to pick one of these, this is just a tool to get you thinking about what your options might be. But more than that, taking a personality test helps you to see your strengths and think about how you might describe yourself to others.
List of things that you like and don’t like about your job
Listing the things you like and dislike about your current job, as well as previous jobs, can also help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, interests and values. It can also help you narrow down your choices. For example, you might identify that you like working with people but dislike working with numbers, so moving forward you can focus on careers that involve interpersonal skills and avoid those that require heavy number crunching.
Do a career mind mapping exercise
Mind mapping is a visual way of seeing the many opportunities in front of you and quite fun. In the middle you can list your current job, a hobby you love, a skill you like using or a blue-sky career idea that you have. From there, as you branch you out you add more details to each branch. For example, if you start with your current job then you could branch out with the skills you like using in your current job, from there you could branch out with hobbies or interests you have that use those skills, or career ideas you’ve heard about that also use those skills. Then you can start to make connections between the branches.
For example, if I work in learning & development and one of the skills I love using is facilitation then I might want to look at ways to combine this with a love of the outdoors. Some of my ideas might be leading outward bound groups, or corporate team building exercises. Or I might want to do some research into the benefits of learning outdoors, perhaps for children, if I’ve also identified that I like being around children.
The important thing is to have fun with this for an hour. Get a big bit of paper, clear your mind of ifs, buts and maybes and get creative.
Have some ideas but need further clarity?
If you have some ideas then the next step for you is doing some research and narrowing your focus to two or three contender careers. I recommend:
Look up people doing a job you like the sound of on LinkedIn
You can get some good info from this alone – you can see the career moves they took to get them to this job, the study that they have done, the groups they belong to and the people they are connected to (maybe someone that you know). But you can take this one step further by reaching out to some of these people for a chat, this is known as an information interview. You’re not asking them for a job but instead you’re asking them to tell you about their career, how they got into it, what an average day is like, the challenges … this research can help you decide if it is the right career for you.
By actioning one of these steps for an hour you will have put the time to good use and will likely have further questions, ideas or things to research. So why not schedule in the next hour?
If you’d like some more ideas for getting started on your career change, download my FREE toolkit Six Simple Steps to get Started on your Career Change.
And good luck!