How to Create your own Career Criteria
I absolutely love the work I do with my clients, I just wish it hadn’t taken me so many years of feeling professionally unfulfilled to figure out what I really wanted for my working life. It’s because of my own career change journey, in part, that I am so passionate about supporting professionals navigating that same path.
These past few years have been a lot about gaining clarity over what’s important to me in my work and what I really want for my future. Like many, my career has taken lots of twists and turns along the way, and whilst many of the roles I’ve undertaken have supported me in what I do now, it’s taken some intentionally introspective discovery work to find the right fit.
It took me a while to realise that autonomy, challenge and making a difference to others are all really important factors to me in my work. Of course, it explains why the historic job roles in which I felt micro-managed, unstimulated and unable to have a greater impact were amongst the most frustrating and dissatisfying in my career to date.
When I start working with my clients, the first half of our programme involves a lot of exploration spent really helping them to get to know themselves. Life is crazy and busy and it can be really difficult to carve out the time to focus on yourself and to know the right questions to ask to gain the clarity you need.
The most frequently asked question I hear from prospective clients considering a midlife career change is “where on earth do I start?”. I’m grateful to have been trained in a highly respected proven career change process, which I love to lead my clients through and also to have first-hand experience of knowing how it feels leaping into the unknown.
(I provide an overview of the whole career change process in my other blog, which you can find here). The first phase in this process is called the ‘explore’ stage and is all about self-discovery and building the foundations for an effective career change. I like to describe this to my clients as building your very own ‘career criteria’ to be able to assess the suitability of opportunities against.
If you’re at the beginning of your career change journey, feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled in your work and keen to explore alternative options, this is the best place to start - getting to know yourself.
Firstly, you want to carry out an audit of what is and isn’t working for you in your current career (you can download a free copy of my career audit to help you with this) - this will offer you clues about what matters to you in your work and will also help you to assess whether it’s something likely to change or whether it indicates the need for a bigger shift.
Then, in order to create your own ‘career criteria’ you’re going to want to uncover:
Your values & motivations
Your goals & priorities
Your skills & strengths
Your passions
Your confidence & mindset
It’s the combination of all these factors that helps you to build up a clear picture of exactly what you need your next career move to facilitate and enable for you. You’ll start to identify common themes that provide really valuable insights as to what really matters for you in your work. When you have that clarity, it then makes it much easier to identify opportunities worth pursuing.
I’m intentionally a life AND career coach because looking at work as something separate or in isolation can create an unhelpful disconnect. You want a job, a role or a business that enables you to achieve your life goals not work against them. By weaving through a holistic approach to career change you’re able to bring you whole self to your work and for your professional life to support your personal sense of success.
One client I had the pleasure of working with had a recurring theme around connection and relationship. She is an extrovert who loves being with people and is hugely energised by the company of others and yet found herself working from home alone a lot of the time. On this occasion, it wasn’t a total career change that she needed because she loves the work itself, it was more a tweak - strategically seeking out opportunities to increase her sense of connection with others.
Another lovely client I had the pleasure of coaching was just about to embark upon an international move with his family. So, he needed a transferable career that he could potentially spend the next year retraining for in the UK and then be employed in when he arrived in their new home country. When we worked together, we uncovered that adventure, fun and being outdoors was really important for him and played an important part in maintaining his mental health, so he actively identified career roles that fulfilled these things for him.
When you know what success really means to you, what your personal life goals are, what’s really important to you in your work and how one feeds into the other, you’re then enabled to make really informed decisions about your next steps. It’s worth considering from the list above, which are you least clear on - is it your values, your passions…? Which element do you need to explore in greater depth to be able to develop your own ‘career criteria’? Once you are able to lay the foundations for a career transition, the remaining elements become much clearer.
If you would like to understand more about what the career change process looks like in practice, gain access to some tools and exercises to help you gain clarity to be able to develop your own ‘career criteria’ and start to take your first steps on this journey, then why not register your interest and join the waiting list for my online workshops or if you’re interested in more intensive support to start right away, you can book in for a completely free strategy session to explore the support options available.
Wishing you all the best as you embark upon your career change journey!
