If you’re struggling with an undecided career path, that’s completely okay. There’s a lot of pressure these days to figure out your life direction early on. But the truth is, many people don’t know what they want right away — and that’s normal. With so many career options out there, it’s easy to feel lost or unsure. While others may rush into decisions, you still have time to learn, explore, and grow at your own pace.
This leads to so many people struggling with their career later down the line, and it’s not surprising at all that this happens. So, we’re here to help a bit. In this article, we’re going to be focusing on some of the things that you can do to help you find what it is that you actually enjoy, rather than forcing you into a box. Want to know more? Feel free to read on.
Work On Improving Your Skills
We’re going to kick things off by talking about improving your skills in general life. One of the problems that people encounter is that they don’t have the necessary skills for the job that they want to do by the time that they decide this is the path they want to take. Now, you might be thinking that the simple solution there would be to just get the skills needed, but it’s not always as simple as this. Learning new things as you get older can sometimes feel like you’re going back to the beginning, and that makes people feel as though they have failed. As such, they end up avoiding doing this, and it’s all a huge problem that it doesn’t need to be.
So, you need to work on improving your skills. You need to think about general skills that would be useful in a whole range of careers, and work on getting started improving them now. If there are specific skills that you don’t have when the time comes, then you can do them when you decide what it is that you want to do. It never hurts to have too many skills, it can only help.
Work A Few Different Jobs For A While
It might be true that you simply have no clue what it is that you want to do, and if that’s the case then why not work a few different jobs and see what you get a feel for. A lot of the time in life, the only way that you are going to know if you like something is to give it a try, because otherwise you can only guess. We know that some people say that working different jobs in a short space of time looks bad on your resume, and we can understand why they say that. But, interviewers often ask during the process if you can explain something like this, so you will have a chance to speak about how you were trying to see what you did and didn’t enjoy. Most employers will not begrudge you this.
You will quickly realize the kinds of things that you do and do not like doing it this way. You will be able to narrow it down quite well with what kind of careers you might be looking to enjoy in the future by process of elimination. You didn’t like working in customer service? Then a customer centered role probably isn’t for you. You did enjoy working with kids? That could be a potential career path.
Go Back To School
There is nothing wrong with going back to school to learn more. Learning is one of the best things that you can do for yourself as it helps you to enhance your knowledge in a range of areas. Specifically, it helps you to learn more in a certain area so that you can work towards starting your career when you’ve decided what it is that you want to do.
We are aware that a lot of people feel as though going back to school is a bad thing, but this is not the case at all. There is nothing wrong with going back to school as an older person, and nobody is judging you for it. The only person who might have an issue with it is you if you’ve got it into your head that you’re somehow failing if you do this.
It’s okay for you to head back to college and explore options before you declare a major as well. There is no pressure, the only pressure that you’re going to feel is the one that you put on yourself.
Teach In The Meantime
It might be the case that you know that one of the things you have found that you enjoy is teaching, but you might not want to do this full time. The good news for you here is that there are options for this. You can look into tutoring if you don’t want to be a full-time teacher but you do get enjoyment from helping kids understand the information that you’re teaching them. Or, if you want to teach but you don’t want to stick to one school and one place, then you can look into how you can teach sociology online or whatever it is that you are interested in. This way, you’re not committed to one single place, but you’re still getting to do the things that you want to.
You also have the option to stop whenever you want. Of course, you can’t just leave students hanging, but you don’t have to continue to teach if you didn’t want to, giving you an easy out.
We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now see some of the things that you should think about if you don’t know what career you want. It’s okay to feel this way, but you have to move forward rather than wallowing.
