Career Search Tips – Know Yourself and Be Yourself (6 of 7)

Finding a “job” isn’t all that difficult, regardless of the economy.  Finding the perfect “opportunity” for yourself, however, can be challenging.  If you follow the 7 rules in this series, you will significantly increase your chances at quickly finding the perfect career opportunity.  My goal is to make your life easier and keep you focused on doing things the right way, not the easy way.  By doing things the right way, you will be more efficient and your search will be more focused and effective.

Remember who you are as you shape your vision.  My goal was to work in sales for a small company that would offer a lot of opportunities to learn and grow.  I wanted to travel all the time, learn every aspect of an industry, and be a huge part of a company.  In order for me to be happy, I knew that I needed to be with a small company, have a lot of responsibility, be challenged constantly and have the freedom to do my work without having a boss micromanaging my efforts.  Hands off supervision was crucial.  I knew my strengths, weaknesses and what type of environment suited me best.  Throughout my search process I never lost focus of this vision and ultimately found an opportunity that matched this description perfectly.  Finding this opportunity took months of hard work, but it was worth all of the time and effort.

The lesson to be learned here is that you must be well aware of your skills, strengths and weaknesses when searching for the right opportunity.  Find something that will allow you to perform at your best and capitalize on your strengths.  If you don’t like to be managed constantly or to have someone looking over your shoulder and evaluating you daily, find an opportunity where you have freedom and flexibility.  If the thought of speaking in front of people makes you nervous, you may not want to start out in sales.  If you hate being indoors all day, an office position probably isn’t the best one for you.  Find the opportunity that allows your strengths to shine.  Keep in mind that over time you will learn to turn your weaknesses into strengths.  This comes from experience and a desire to improve yourself.

Knowing yourself means that you need to be your own person and not allow others to tell you who you are or what you should be.  A perfect example is all of the young professionals who are in law school or medical school because they were told by their parents that lawyers and doctors make a lot of money.  If you want to be in either of those fields and enjoy that type of work, then by all means go for it!  However, if your main motivation is that your parents are both attorneys and they told you to follow the same path, then you might need to find a better reason.  Know yourself and what you truly want out of your own professional life.  Do what you feel will make you happy.  If you aren’t sure what that is, then follow your heart and see where it leads you.  You’ll be surprised how often it takes you to exactly where you are meant to be in life.