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The most popular ways of choosing a career are often the most unsuccessful in achieving success. So how do most people choose a career? Here is a list of the most common ways that people approach it.

How to Choose a Career – Why the 7 Most Commonly Used Approaches are Often Unsuccessful

1. Choosing Careers That Are Closely Aligned to the Last Job You Did

When going through the process of how to choose a career, most people who have a previous employment history select a career that is similar to their previous employment.

The main problem with this approach is that the last job a person did usually includes all the key elements of a career they did not like

So if the new career choice is based on experience in that job, they are only heading for more of the same.

2. Trying to Match a Career With the Subjects You Were Good at in School or College

This is one of the most popular methods of choosing careers and sometimes it can work quite well.
However more often it does not.
The problem with this method of how to choose a career is that it becomes very limiting if school or college subjects are the only or main selection criteria.

With an unending list of careers on offer, you will miss assessing many possible career possibilities if you just look at what you were good at in school.

If we have been particularly passionate about a subject at school, this certainly can provide some nice clues when choosing careers.
But only that, some nice clues.

3. Responding to the Market and the Current Needs of Employers

It is good practice to pay attention to what the market is doing when addressing the issue of how to choose a career.

By this I mean, being aware of what careers and industries are expanding and in growth mode and which ones are dying out.

However, some people’s process of choosing careers is based purely on what today’s ten hottest careers might be.

But using this type of criteria for choosing careers, you will be totally ignoring the foundation of good career selection, that is, who am I and what am I good at.

4. Choosing a Career That is Safe and Secure

Is there really such a thing as a safe and secure career.
I’m not sure safe and secure is very often good criteria for choosing careers. Anyone who ever left their mark on the world was very rarely safe.

I know that we live in uncertain economic times, but it is during these very difficult times that a person most needs to be doing the job they love to do and are good at.

Because when you are doing a job that you love to do and are good at, you will probably be in a much more secure job.
This is because the people that lose their jobs first during economic uncertainty are those who are not the top performers.

If I am an employer and I need to lay off 20% of my staff.
Guess who goes first.
Those who are best at their job will be the last to go.

And those who are not very good at their job are usually in this position because their job is mismatched with their natural abilities.

This is not always the case, but more often than not. Looking through a list of careers can be a common way of choosing careers.
Although it can be helpful to see if anything on the careers list has initial appeal, lists usually provide only a portion of the available career options.

As mentioned above, it really is starting in the wrong place for someone wanting to know how to choose a career with a long term focus. The best method of choosing careers always begins by looking inside the individual, rather than looking at the job.

6. Selecting The Best Paying Careers

Of course, the money will always come into the mix when considering how to choose a career.

But if you are going to be choosing careers based primarily on the best-paying careers, research tells us that you will not experience long-term job satisfaction.

This reminds me of a situation when I was about 20 years old.
A friend of mine who was an intelligent and likable fellow decided to adopt the ‘find the best paying career’ approach when deciding on how to choose a career.

He concluded that he wanted to get a job at the meat processing plant. My immediate thoughts were “what a ghastly job”.
So I quizzed him on why he wanted a job like that.

His response was that this was one of the best paying careers that he knew about.

Now let’s face it if you can secure a job that rates as one of the best paying careers, it can be very enticing.

And of course, there is nothing wrong with seeking employment in a job like this if it is part of a longer career plan to find your dream career.

Of course, there will be some people to whom working in a meatworks will be a very fulfilling job.

But I’m talking about taking a job purely for the money where you otherwise have no desire for that type of work.
And my friend didn’t really want to work in the meatworks.
He was enticed entirely by the fact that it was one of the best paying careers in his area.

7. Visit a Career Counselor for Advice

This is a great first step when choosing careers, either prior to beginning your work life or seeking career change advice further down the track.

Somebody who is trained in unraveling the mystery of our uniqueness in relation to the world of work can definitely help us decide how to choose a career.

But as with any professional group, there are good career counselors and not so good ones.
So you will need to do your homework before choosing a career counselor to visit.

The best piece of advice I could give somebody prior to going to see a career counselor is to realize that a career counselor cannot tell you what to do.
In fact, a good career counselor will definitely not want to tell you what to do.

Her job is to help you unravel your deepest motivations and desires and show you how they connect with the process of how to choose a career.

A process that is primarily directed by you and only aided by the career counselor.

8. Taking an Online Career Test and Choosing a Job from the Results

I don’t really recommend this when choosing careers
There are problems on a number of fronts when taking an online career quiz or one of the many types of career tests.
They are frequently counter-productive because they often do not identify some of the very good fit career choices that should be known to an individual.

9. Following in Their Parents Footsteps

This method of how to choose a career is probably not as common as it used to be a generation or two ago.

But there are expectations from some parents for their kids to carry on in the family business or simply to do a job that they think is a good career choice.
This can also come from well-meaning friends.

It is always good to listen to what others think you are good at. Sometimes they do have your best interests at heart.

But other times they may not. Listen carefully to the reasons behind their suggestions.

What is the Best Advice on How to Choose a Career?

Socrates dictum ‘Know Thyself’ is always a good place to start

You and I are incredibly unique individuals and are born with different gifts and abilities that must be taken into account when we are deciding how to choose a career.

The problem has always been how to find out what those genuine inborn job skills are. For reasons I’m unsure about, some people know instinctively how to choose a career from a very young age.

These people make up a very small percentage of the population, but they can be frequently found in the top of their field.

You probably know one. My twelve-year-old son fits this criterion.

Recognizing Inborn Abilities at a Young Age

At 12 years old, you don’t have a career development plan, so the only way a person of that age could be so sure of what he wants to do would be from some intuitive knowing.
My twelve-year-old son has already chosen a career instinctively.

From a very early age, he has always had a fascination with aeroplanes.

His passion never wavered, and now at the age of 12, he has already commenced his private pilot’s license training and is a member of the local aero club.

At no point during his childhood, did we or anyone else suggest to him that flying aeroplanes would be a good career or in any way give him any advice on how to choose a career?

Recently on his birthday, I took a short trip to Christchurch International Airport (which is at the end of our street) to sit with him and watch the planes take off and land.

We sat there for quite some time until it was dark.
In the distant night sky, I spotted the headlights of an aeroplane making its landing approach.

Then my 12-year-old son said to me, “Yeah, that’s an Airbus A320.” I looked at him, thinking that there was no way he could tell what type of plane that was in the dark from such a distance, as all I could see was one white light in the sky.

Then he went on to explain to me that he could just make out the flashing sequences of the small lights on the wings.

And from that, he knew that it was an Airbus A320.

He used to sit in his bedroom at night, and when the wind was coming from the Northwest, all the airplanes flew over his bedroom window at about 150 meters above.

He would write down the plane types in a book including the airline and the estimated arrival time which he obtained from the Internet.

He got to know all the plane types, and he could tell you remarkable details about the planes, just from his prolonged observations.

Finding Your Dream Career

That’s an example of somebody for whom choosing careers seems to happen without even thinking about it.

Unfortunately, most people don’t possess that innate ability.
And if you are not one of those people who know what work you were born for intuitively, there is still hope, a lot of hope.

There are some very tangible things you can do that will greatly enhance your ability to know how to choose a career that’s right for you.

A lot of people have some insight into their deepest passions and inborn skills.

But this needs to be probed quite deeply to establish confidence when choosing careers.

I have developed the Dream Career Finder to accomplish exactly that.

It is a tool that will make it very clear to you, what type of work you should be doing so that you can experience that magnificent sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that comes with doing a job that you were made to do.

Learn more about how the Dream Career Finder can help you.

Some detrimental results may occur if career aptitude tests are not used prudently.

One of the main roles of a counselor in providing career change advice is to empower you to make your own quality career choices with the counselor there only to help you through the process.

The process involving your career choices must principally be self-directed to achieve optimal results and this is where a career aptitude test or other career assessments can get in the way of this process.

The primary focus in all good career counseling should be to uncover the hearts desires of a person in relation to the world of work.

How A Good Career Counselor Works

A good career counselor will help you get in touch with your inner fire – those passions and deepest desires that you were born with.
Then she will work with you to see how these relate to the world of work.
And the role of a career counselor is to help you do that to yourself.

Anything that gets in the way of this process can be damaging, including taking free career aptitude tests or any other type of career path test.

An unhealthy dependence can develop when a counselor sits across the table from you with the career aptitude test results in hand and that dubious list of careers that comes with it.

Career Tests Have Power

There comes an unspoken expectation that these test results have some unspoken authority.

A certain position of power shift can take place, toward the counselor and away from you.
You are now unconsciously saying to the counselor

show me the list of careers that career aptitude test tells me I should do

What happens then, when none of the careers on the list genuinely excite you.
Both parties can feel a certain responsibility to commit to something on that career path test despite a real lack of enthusiasm for any of them.

It is the same when completing a career aptitude test online on your own.
You feel that this elaborate career path test software has to be right.
That list of careers that the computer spits out now has a degree of authority over you.

This can quench any partially hidden desires in your heart that the career path test didn’t reveal.
And perhaps you weren’t totally sure about these in the beginning, so you dismiss it forever.
So now the test results have led you away from a legitimate method of how to choose a career.

This information refers only a career aptitude test that provides a list of careers or job types with the results of the test. Other assessments which only provide general information about aptitudes or a person’s motivations and do not provide a list of careers, may be useful.

Career Decisions Must Be Driven by You

The process of unraveling your destiny in the world of work works best when the whole career choice process is primarily directed by you and only aided by the career counselor, and not the other way around.

Many of us have an element of desire for someone else to tell us what we should do when difficult decisions are being faced.

There seems to be a part of us that would like someone else to provide the solution for us.
And although it is very attractive at the moment, things such as a career path test usually do not help us grow as a person.

The better self-help process not only helps us with how to choose a career that has more successful outcomes but also assists us in life in other areas by helping us become more emotionally intelligent and an empowered individual.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t seek help in solving our problems, just that we shouldn’t become overly dependent on the process.

Coaches Shouldn’t Play the Game for You

This is a bit like the role of a sports coach.
Most of us know that a good coach is an essential part of success for a sportsperson.

However, it is always the player who ultimately governs how well things do or don’t go.

The coach will train them, they will encourage them, and they will seek to extract the greatest possible talent out of that person physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually so they can become all they are able to be.

But if that coach in a bizarre twist started to take too much control and began to actually play the part of the game for the athlete, then the player would begin to lose all the benefits of getting out there and learning by doing.

Instead, they would begin to play the game less, become ridiculously dependent on the coach and ultimately fail as an athlete.

Their potential for growth and sense of self-achievement is gone.
The career counselor’s role is not too dissimilar.

She must come alongside and extract the best out of you, helping you accurately discover the wonderful gifts and inborn job skills you have within.

And with skillful questioning and probing help, you unravel those career choices that your heart is most closely aligned to; something a career path test or free career aptitude tests are unable to achieve.

He must never get in the ring for you and begin to fight for you.
If he does this it will sabotage the career planning process.

How to find your dream career using the best method I know of.

Other career development articles relating to career tests that you may be interested in include:

Career placement test – How they can limit career choices.
Career personality test – Is there a conflict of interests?
Career assessment – Uniqueness not highlighted!
Career testing – Why the experts are running from them.

Is career development coaching worth the investment of your time and money?

Many forms of coaching, including corporate and life coaching as well as coaching in the careers domain, have become popular in recent times.

But does career coaching really achieve worthwhile results?

This career development article asks the question:
Does career development coaching deliver significant results for its participants and is it justified as one of the most popular career development tools?

What is Career Development Coaching?

Exactly what is career development?
A good definition of career development is the creation and implementation of action steps towards a predetermined career goal.

And a definition of career development coaching is simply the enlisting of professional help to achieve these goals. A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment
– John Wooden-

Often participants involved in this type of professional career development coaching, create a one to the five-year career development plan, to help them achieve these goals.

Coaching is currently one of the most widely used career development tools.

Central to the success of it is a career coachability to help a person extract the absolute maximum potential from within themselves and apply to the world of work.

Coaching needs to be delivered by someone who can see your potential, believes fervently in your potential, and is willing to go the extra mile to see that potential fully realized.

An ability to clearly and passionately see what a person could become further down the road is what all good career coaches invariably possess.

Career Development Coaching’s Primary Purpose:
It’s Not About What Peak You Reach, Rather What Peak You Could Have Reached

John Wooden, one of the most inspiring coaches I know says:

Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you could have accomplished.

It’s about ensuring that every ounce of potential that is within you is indeed realized.

And of course, that potential will differ from person to person.
What you should accomplish in your career and indeed life, has nothing to do with what someone else may accomplish.

For this reason, career coaching isn’t about [or at least it shouldn’t be about] becoming better than somebody else, or even necessarily reaching a certain high place in your career.

The litmus test is: Have you become the best you can be in your career with the gifts and abilities you have.
The competition should only ever be with ourselves in that sense.

Achieving our maximum potential is more important than any external measurement of success.
And great career development coaches recognize this distinction.

Somebody who reaches a certain high pinnacle in their career might well have underachieved compared to someone who didn’t reach that same hight but did utilize their full potential.

Will I Benefit from Career Coaching

Significant benefits can be realized by a participant in career coaching, but it is critical that the right coach is enlisted. Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do

— John Wooden

In selecting a career coach, be sure to find someone in whom you feel an unfettered belief and commitment to you oozing from them.

The “I believe in you” energy that flows from a career coach will be instrumental in your success.

This is possibly the most important issue you should take away from this career development article.

Another essential aspect of career coaching is the coach’s ability to help you discover your inborn job skills and then assist you in detecting where you most want to use them.

A career coach will help you work out what you can do really well and throw out what you can’t do.
[Some people have difficulty throwing out the things they can’t do]

In the words of Arthur Miller:

You can’t be anything you want to be

Once you know where you want to go, the job of a career development coach is to launch you into it.

Knowing what to do is only half the battle, launching you to do it is often the difficult part. Half of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.

–Carl Zuckmeyer

A further benefit of career coaching is the way a skilled coach asks questions that result in you gaining insight from your own answers.

This type of skillful questioning is at the heart of uncovering what you are truly good at.
The net result is that you will begin to understand a lot better.

You will become more creative, more productive with better ideas about where your career and indeed your life could be as a result of the greater self-awareness you have.

Is Career Coaching Worth The Investment?

The benefits of career development coaching outlined above suggest that it is worth the cost to you both financially and in time commitment.

One of the great benefits of enlisting a career coach is that you will gravitate to work that more closely aligns with your inborn job skills.

Doing work which is closely aligned to your natural giftings results in your sense of self-worth skyrocketing.

Show me someone who has a tremendous sense of self-worth and confidence in their own innate abilities [but not an over-inflated ego] and is using them, and I will show you someone who contributes greatly to the world.

An ambitious young boy asked a seasoned and successful old man what the key was to his success.

Old Man: The key to success young man, is to make the right decisions.

Boy: How do I learn how to make the right decisions?

Old Man: Make plenty of wrong ones! Career development coaching usually results in you doing more with your career.

When you do more, you make more mistakes.

But the person who makes more mistakes learns more than those who don’t make mistakes, often because they aren’t doing that much.

This career development article posed the question:
“Does career development coaching produce significant results for the participant?

Career development coaching will produce significant results on the proviso that participants spend time in finding the right coach and the career coach possesses the attributes outlined above.

Other topics related to this career development article include:

What is career development

Career development plan

Career development theory

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Is career development coaching worth the investment of your time and money?

Many forms of coaching, including corporate and life coaching as well as coaching in the careers domain, have become popular in recent times.

But does career coaching really achieve worthwhile results?

This career development article asks the question:
Does career development coaching deliver significant results for its participants and is it justified as one of the most popular career development tools?

What is Career Development Coaching?

Exactly what is career development?
A good definition is the creation and implementation of action steps towards a predetermined career goal.

And a definition of career development coaching is simply the enlisting of professional help to achieve these goals.

A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment

– John Wooden

Often participants involved in this type of professional career development coaching, create a one to the five-year career development plan, to help them achieve these goals.

Coaching is currently one of the most widely used career development tools.

Central to the success of it is a career coachability to help a person extract the absolute maximum potential from within themselves and apply to the world of work.

Coaching needs to be delivered by someone who can see your potential, believes fervently in your potential, and is willing to go the extra mile to see that potential fully realized.

An ability to clearly and passionately see what a person could become further down the road is what all good career coaches invariably possess.

Coaching’s Primary Goal: It’s Not About What Peak You Reach, Rather What Peak You Could Have Reached

John Wooden, one of the most inspiring coaches I know says:

Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you could have accomplished.

It’s about ensuring that every ounce of potential that is within you is indeed realized. And of course, that potential will differ from person to person.
What you should accomplish in your career and indeed life, has nothing to do with what someone else may accomplish.

For this reason, career coaching isn’t about [or at least it shouldn’t be about] becoming better than somebody else, or even necessarily reaching a certain high place in your career.

The litmus test is: Have you become the best you can be in your career with the gifts and abilities you have.
The competition should only ever be with ourselves in that sense.

Achieving our maximum potential is more important than any external measurement of success.
And great career development coaches recognize this distinction.

Somebody who reaches a certain high pinnacle in their career might well have underachieved compared to someone who didn’t reach that same height but did utilize their full potential.

Will I Benefit from Career Coaching

Significant benefits can be realized by a participant in career coaching, but it is critical that the right coach is enlisted.

Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do

-John Wooden

In selecting a career coach, be sure to find someone in whom you feel an unfettered belief and commitment to you oozing from them.

The “I believe in you” energy that flows from a career coach will be instrumental in your success. This is possibly the most important issue you should take away from this career development article.

Another essential aspect of career coaching is the coach’s ability to help you discover your inborn job skills and then assist you in detecting where you most want to use them.

A career coach will help you work out what you can do really well and throw out what you can’t do.
[Some people have difficulty throwing out the things they can’t do]

In the words of Arthur Miller:

You can’t be anything you want to be

Once you know where you want to go, the job of a career development coach is to launch you into it.

Knowing what to do is only half the battle, launching you to do it is often the difficult part.

Half of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.

–Carl Zuckmeyer

A further benefit of career coaching is the way a skilled coach asks questions that result in you gaining insight from your own answers.

This type of skillful questioning is at the heart of uncovering what you are truly good at.
The net result is that you will begin to understand a lot better.

You will become more creative, more productive with better ideas about where your career and indeed your life could be as a result of the greater self-awareness you have.

Is Career Coaching Worth The Investment?

The benefits of career development coaching outlined above suggest that it is worth the cost to you both financially and in time commitment.

One of the great benefits of enlisting a career coach is that you will gravitate to work that more closely aligns with your inborn job skills.

Doing work which is closely aligned to the results of your natural gifts in your sense of self-worth skyrocketing.

Show me someone who has a tremendous sense of self-worth and confidence in their own innate abilities [but not an over-inflated ego] and is using them, and I will show you someone who contributes greatly to the world.

An ambitious young boy asked a seasoned and successful old businessman what the key was to his success.

Old Man: The key to success young man, is to make the right decisions.

Boy: How do I learn how to make the right decisions?

Old Man: Make plenty of wrong ones!

Career development coaching usually results in you doing more with your career.

When you do more, you make more mistakes.

But the person who makes more mistakes learns more than those who don’t make mistakes, often because they aren’t doing that much.

This career development article posed the question:
“Does career development coaching produce significant results for the participant?

Career development coaching will produce significant results on the proviso that participants spend time in finding the right coach and the career coach possesses the attributes outlined above.

Other topics related to this career development article include:

What is career development

Career development plan

Career development theory

A good definition of career development is the proactive planning and implementation of action steps towards your career goals.

Although this definition is related to career planning, it’s a definition that can be applied to any area we want to succeed in.

A career development plan, either created on your own or with the help of a professional career development consultant, will more often than not take you to that place in your career you would otherwise not get to.

What is career development planning likely to accomplish?

1. It will force you to regularly perform a self-assessment on where you are now in your career, where you would like to be and to assess the inborn job skills you enjoy using.

2. This will usually lead to you acquiring work that is a good fit for you and that you are particularly suitable for. This results in a greater sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in your career.

3. If points one and two above are accomplished, this inevitably leads to you earning more money because employees who work on tasks they enjoy and are good at, invariably get paid more.

For more information on these benefits see my career development plan page

Stages of Career Development

Donald Super, career educationalist, ascribed to a career development theory that proposed career development consisted of five basic stages.

The stages fundamentally mirrored age groups through life, starting in our early teens when we began to seriously think about what job we would like to do right through to retirement age.

Donald Super’s theory suggested that around midlife, a worker frequently asked if they wanted to continue doing their job for the rest of their life.

After seeking career change advice, they would either make changes or revert back to an earlier stage of career development which may involve investigating new options and investing in new learning.

Those Who Plan What Is Good Find Love and Faithfulness

Proverbs 14: 22

I’m not sure how accurate this career development theory is today and if it would stand in the vastly changed job market scene.
I discuss other career development theories on my career development theory page.

Keys to Successful Career Development

Writing your goals down is a critical component of success when creating career development plans.

Why write them down?
If we simply think about how career goals, firstly we soon forget.
Brain experts tell us that the more methods in which we process information, the more that information becomes lodged in our brain.

When we write something down it also forces us to expand our thinking and challenges us to develop our thoughts deeper around our future career development plans.

The act of writing, for example, a five-year career development plan forces us to address issues involving our future career that we would never achieve by simply thinking about it.

How Difficult Should My Goal Be

“The highest level of effort occurred when the task was moderately difficult, and the lowest levels occurred when the task was either very easy or very hard”

From “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation, A 35-Year Odyssey”

Writing it out takes it to a higher level forcing us to produce more details and engage ourselves in a type of mini brainstorm about our future stages of career development.

From personal experience, I know that when I have committed a goal to paper it has dramatically increased the chances of that goal being realized, although these days I don’t literally write it down.
I use a great little goal setting software program called Lifetick.

However just writing it down, of course, is only the beginning.

Action Must be Taken

The hardest part of realizing any goal is not the writing up the action plan or setting dates for completing each step of the goal or even getting started on your first action point.

But rather the ongoing discipline and perseverance required seeing through the various steps of the goal to completion.

Research shows that life coaches found almost half of the clients that fell out of coaching programs did so because they didn’t want to take the necessary action steps.

So how can we increase our chances of following through to achieve a career goal?

Probably the first thing is to recognize that there is a natural human tendency to avoid anything that stretches us, or makes us feel uncomfortable, or appears to be risky or scary in any way.
Simply recognizing that you have that tendency is an important first step.

The second thing is that if we want to be people that achieve in any area of life we need to do things that feel uncomfortable.

Successful people are just normal people who are prepared to do the uncomfortable things that most people won’t do.

One of the most important things to achieving success with your career development plan is to implement some form of accountability.

This is where professional career coaching comes into its own.

Career Development Coaching

What is career development coaching?
It is simply a method of creating and implementing your one to a five-year career development plan with the help of a professional career development consultant.

Maybe the easiest way to answer that is to try to picture a world-class sportsperson, whether that be an individual golfer, a world-class soccer player or a world champion Formula One driver, in every case they will have that all-important coach present in their life.

Just about every significant goal in life that we want to accomplish is more likely to be achieved, and achieved faster, if we have somebody else alongside us coaching, encouraging and challenging us to be the best we can.

So what is career development going to do to help you get ahead in your career?
If you actively engage in some form of personal and career development, you should expect to see some tangible results reasonably quickly.

Perhaps start by drafting up a five-year career development plan or commencing a career development coaching program.

The time and money spent on any of these career development tools are often insignificant when compared to the long-term benefits of finally working in your dream career and of course the increased remuneration that usually goes with it.