CAREER FRIEND

How to find your dream career

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." Confucius

Pretty powerful words from Confucius – imagine that if you find your dream career you would never have to work another day. Never wake up and have that sinking feeling in your stomach thinking about what faced you in the office. Never get to the end of the working year, and have a hard time thinking what you had accomplished. To many people this may seem like an impossible dream. If you are one of those people, then take a few moments right now to free your mind and think hard about what you want from your dream career.

What do you want from your dream career?

Perhaps you already know what your dream career is? But perhaps there are other careers that you haven’t yet thought of which could stimulate and excite you even more?

Find a comfy chair in your favourite room, unplug the telephone, turn off the mobile, and imagine yourself working in your dream career. Right now – go and do it!

What we're going to be constructing over the next minutes, hours, days is your career blueprint - your set of plans which will help you to achieve and succeed in your dream career!

Step 1 to finding your dream career

So, are you imaging that you are, right now, IN your dream career? Think as hard as you can about what you are actually DOING!

• Perhaps you are a marketing executive in a key meeting? If so, are you leading the meeting, or reporting to the CEO? What are you discussing? Your work or someone else’s? Where is the meeting? On a factory floor or on the 24th floor of the most prestigious office block in town?
  
• Perhaps you are a product designer? If so, are you designing the whole product, or just part of it which will integrate with the designs of others? Are you designing a product which will be launched in the next few months, or is it a concept design which will continue to change significantly before being launched in years to come?
  

Now let's choose an extreme ‘dream career’ to illustrate a point.

Perhaps you want to be a motor-yacht salesman in the Cayman Islands? Sure that must be a dream career for many people, but try now (in your comfy chair) to immerse youself in what exactly it is which you find appealing about this job.

• Do you like selling luxury goods to well-heeled people? If so, are there other careers which could provide this? Perhaps selling luxury cars or jewellery? Or you could put together high value holidays for the jet-set?
  
• Do you like being around motor yachts? If so, perhaps you could train to be a skipper taking people on motor yacht holidays? Or you could be an instructor to teach new owners how to get the most out of their expensive purchases?
  
• Or perhaps it is the outdoor life that is particularly appealing? What about being the membership manager of an exclusive tennis club or golf club on the Mediterranean?

Whether or not you wanted to be a motor-yacht salesman in the Med or not, the point of this exercise was to force you to dissemble what exactly it is you are looking for in your dream career. It has also shown how, even if you have an idea of what your dream career may be, that there may be other careers out there RIGHT NOW which would suit your desires AS MUCH as if not MORE THAN your first choice!

There is a second step to this process, and this is slightly harder. But whoever said that working out what you want – what you really want – was easy? Remember – we’re trying to work out what you want to do for your living!! Remember the quotation from Confucius – we’re not trying to find you a job to go to work to each morning, but a living which you can fulfil each morning WITHOUT IT FEELING LIKE WORK!!

Step 2 to finding your dream career

Are you sitting comfortably? Is the phone off the hook? Are the kids occupied? Good, because you need time to concentrate on this…

Again, imagine your ideal career, and what you would be doing right now if you were there. Now, think about what you would have been doing the hour before, and the hour afterwards. And two hours before and afterwards. And a day before and afterwards. And, if you have the time, a week before and afterwards.

The point of this exercise is to make sure you understand the full requirements of your dream career.

Perhaps you want to be an advertising account manager, presenting your team’s proposals to a potential client?

• The hour before, you might have been preparing for the presentation – perhaps rehearsing in front of the partners of the advertising company you work for. What happens if they don’t like what you say? Or the way you say it? Do you change your presentation with only an hour to go? Is this going to affect your review? How are you going to take what they say to improve your presentation without allowing their criticisms to detract you from the perfect delivery?
  
• The day before, you might have been meeting with the ‘creatives’, the people who actually create the advertising slogans and advertisements, trying to relate what the adverts they are creating to the key requirements of your potential client. What if you can’t see the link? Do you try to change the adverts at this late stage? What if the creatives disagree with you? They can be quite a volatile lot – how will you get them to change the adverts?
  
• The day after, what happens if you’d lost the pitch? How do you explain it to your bosses? How do you explain it to the creatives? Was it their wrong ideas or your poor presentation? Or did you give them the wrong guidelines to start with? What are you going to say now?
  
• And even if you’d won the pitch, what are you going to do (as well as take your creatives out for a VERY lavish dinner I hope!)? It’s time to get to work!! How are you going to convert those ideas into a viable campaign? How are you going to test your ideas against your target market? How are you going to integrate the results from focus groups with the purist artistic minds of your creatives to arrive at the optimal solution for your client?

Again, this exercise is only to make you start to think about what you REALLY WANT from your dream career, and to make sure that you FULLY UNDERSTAND some of the demands that go with holding down such a career.

So, go and get yourself another cup of coffee or tea, or whatever you like to relax with. Cuddle up in your favourite chair. Take a pad, and go through the two exercises we’ve discussed.

Firstly, think about your dream career, and what you like about it. Write down all of the things which you find appealing. Now, are there other careers available which might give you what you are looking for? Against your list of appealing features, write down which other careers might be able to satisfy each feature. And be as creative as you can!! Secondly, think about the other aspects of your dream career. Do you fully appreciate the demands that each career expects of you so that you are able to enjoy the best parts of the career? The results of this exercise will be particularly important in the next stage of this course.

Get the job you deserve

So you’ve done your work? I hope that you have a neatly set-out page, with a list of attributes that you want from your dream career, as well as a list of alternative careers which could also satisfy those attributes. Of course, although the page may be well set out, I hope that there are plenty of sheets of crumpled paper in your waste paper bin which are full of ideas you had on your way to creating the first step of your career blue-print.

And, I hope that you have a full and thorough realisation of what your dream career entails.

So, for extra credit, take your list of ‘alternative careers’ – you know, the ones which will be able to give you what you were hoping to gain from your ‘ideal career’ and go through Exercise Two with each of these careers. Are there aspects of these careers you hadn’t though about? Perhaps when considering these careers in the round, they are in fact MORE APPEALING that the career you had chosen as your dream career?

Wrap-up

Anyway, that’s it for this lesson.

Are you exhausted? Do you have a note pad full of ideas?

If so, then WELL DONE!

Remember, this is worth working hard on! You are trying to find a career for yourself which, as Confucius says, does not feel like work at all!!

Okay, I think I’ve worked you hard enough for now. So get another drink of whatever you like to relax with, slump down in your comfy chair and start thinking about all of those different careers.

And hopefully today has given you an appreciation of exactly what your new career entails, as well as what other careers might meet your needs.

Well done! I’m proud of you for taking the first step to finding your dream career!!