Deciding on a career when you a high school student can be a tough ask. How are you supposed to know what you want to do with the rest of your life at this stage? Finding a career that suits you is a process. If you approach it in bite-sized steps, you’ll make great progress in identifying your career aspirations and goals.
As a high school student, you get asked the same question many times: ‘what career do you want to do?’ If you don’t know what you want to do, this can be a stressful question. It’s also true that many people spend a bit of time having different work experiences before understanding what they really want to do. And a lot of people nowadays have more than one career in their lifetime too.
If you’re stuck for ideas, it’s probably beneficial for you to go through a process of refining your thoughts and ideas about suitable careers. This will help you focus on something you have interests or strengths in, enabling you to pursue a college education that builds on this. Even if you go on to do a career that is slightly different from the one you originally anticipated, identifying your strengths and interests will hopefully send you in a direction that will be useful to your future overall.
Here are four steps you need to take to find your ideal future career.
1. Identify Your Interests
Not everyone will end up doing a career they love, and it can be misleading for teachers, advisors and parents to tell youngsters to pursue their passions. It’s important to be realistic and understand that relatively few people end up doing a dream career. Despite this, it’s important to begin your career journey by honing in on all the things you are interested in. This will shepherd you in certain directions that might be suitable for you in terms of your career.
Remember that your interests can be topics and hobbies, but they can also be types of things you enjoy doing. For example, you might love singing and cooking, and these can be areas to start thinking about in terms of careers. But you may also feel really happy when you’re problem solving with your parents while trying to put a piece of flat-packed furniture together! These can all be things that might give you clues about career directions.
2. Find Your Strengths
Identifying your strengths is different from finding your interests. While your interests are things you like doing, your strengths are things you are already good at doing. Your strengths might be math, creative writing and giving your friends advice when they have a problem. Mapping these strengths out alongside your interests might start to give you some ideas of careers you might be good at.
For example, if you like cooking and you’re good at creative writing, a career in recipe development for a food corporation might be something you want to pursue. Equally, you might want to keep your hobbies as just hobbies – as everyone needs something they enjoy doing to relax. You might simply pursue something you know you’ll be good at and which has plenty of job opportunities, such as a career in coding or machine learning if you have a strength in math.
3. Speak to a College Counselor
College counseling is a great way to build on your ideas, interests and strengths in relation to possible careers. Not only does a college counselor have a lot of insight and experience in giving career advice, they are able to advise on possible directions you can take your career in, and the colleges that might be suitable for you. They know a lot about the academic standards, culture and costs of different colleges, and they can help you hone your admission strategies and applications.
4. Browse Careers
Working on your interests, strengths and college wish lists will all help to bring you closer to your future career goals. To get to the college application stage, you will likely have considered multiple different careers, to ensure you apply for a college program that will fit with your possible future career. It is most likely that you have whittled it down to a general career area, but you will want to continue working on your ideas to find some ideas of exact careers.
For example, if you have decided you would like to work in healthcare, you will want to start looking into which areas appeal to you. You could explore everything from being a doctor or nurse, to more specialized areas such as physical therapists or ultrasound technicians. Read lots of different career descriptions and job descriptions, and see what you might be able to get some work experience in. Nothing beats working alongside actual professionals for a while to get an idea of whether this is a career for you.