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A lack of career awareness is causing drastic job shifts among the youth, and sometimes reluctant stays with reduced job satisfaction. Research shows, an average of 5.7 career changes happen in the US for workers between the age 18-24.Â
In the other, having a clear and concise career vision maps to an ideal job that in turn kick-starts productivity at work. With a connected, step-by-step road-map, that’s informed by knowledge, one can also earn higher reputation, greater salary, and improved job satisfaction.Â
Irrespective of what your current designation is, you can craft for yourself a clear and deliberate career vision right now and navigate your way towards incredible success. This article states five practical ways of how you can establish a clear and deliberate vision for your career and reach your true potential.
Working tips to craft an ideal vision for a career!
A career vision is the end goal where you wanna see yourself at. It’s a dream place where your professional and financial preferences get served. Having a clear view of your career goals helps you identify these preferences divulging to you your potential for growth.Â
This very vision, if absent, causes you to undermine your true potential for growth where you remain content with what you already have.
Here’s how you can craft for yourself an ideal career vision following simple guidelines as stated below.
1. Know Your Personality
We’ve included this point as the first step in discovering an ideal career vision for a reason. And that reason is; we want you to reflect on how you behave towards life. There are four dimensions which behavioral experts: Mayers and Briggs found as fundamental in describing an individual’s personality. These are:
- The way you interact with yourself and the outer world;
- The way you perceive information;Â
- The way you make decisions; and
- Â How much you try to stay organized.
Discovering your true nature is really important as you realize this at a certain point in your life. A person knowledgeable of their choices helps them create an ideal environment for themselves that energizes, motivates whatever they do. It also helps pursue opportunities that rouses their full potential and nurtures both physical and psychological health.
Now it’s understood this phase could be time taking and overwhelming, a scientific method can ease your efforts of discovering your personality.
Mayers and Briggs personality type indicator (MBTI) is one such scientific method that accurately predicts a person’s behavior and choices towards life.
At Dicecamp individuals can take MBTI assessment in our improved and easy-to-understand personality quiz that marks an ideal career. Not only this, our analysis also provides insights on the preferred work environments, job designations, and income potential of an individual.Â
After discovering a list of informed career choices that suit your personality, it’s time you move on to the next step in establishing a career that sparks.
2. Study Market Prospects for an Industry
Research credible market prospects against your list of career options from step 1. Cross check among various career choices to see which one offers more promising professional and financial prospects.
Market growth is an important factor that predicts the market’s investment potential as well as revenue generation as a result of companies selling their products or services to end users. An individual can study market prospects in the following two ways.
1. One way of measuring market growth is through the total revenue that’s generated as a result of selling as well as producing new services.Â
One can compare growth rate between industries to see which has brighter opportunities. As an example, consider the market prospects for cloud computing versus on-prem database management systems. According to Gartner (a leading global market analyst) the end user spending in public cloud services for 2022 is expected to rise to US 83.8 billion, compared to 2021, totalling to $494.7 billion. A separate Gartner report on on-prem DBMS shows a revenue growth in 2021 of only $2.2 billion totalling to $147 billion, which is still higher than previous years.Â
Studying the above market prospects, a reader can easily understand that job opportunities in the public cloud services are way greater compared to the on-prem DBMS industry since companies would need cloud professionals to fulfill the services demand.
2. Another way of measuring market growth is through Compound Annual Growth Rate- CAGR which is the rate of investment per year to achieve the desired forecast at the end of the investment period. For example, according to the latest research, the CAGR for the Big Data industry is forecasted to be 10% which equates to a massive US$176 billion worth investment in just five years between 2022-2027.
Remember, the CAGR is not to be compared between two industries since it shows the growth per year in relevance to that specific industry.
To perform market research, it’s important that one always visits the most credible market analysis reports; such as those by Gartner and Kantar, to see how well a career promises future investment and job opportunities.Â
3. Know Job Roles for a Career
Once you know how promising the market is in terms of the investment potential and revenue growth, the next step is to know different job roles for that market.
For example, if you found the DevOps market to be alluring, the next milestone would be to study the different job roles offered by a DevOps career. Now there might be a situation where you are to shortlist a specific job role that interests you. For a DevOps career, one can opt for DevOps engineer, DevOps lead, QA in DevOps, Security Professional, Software Developer, and DevOps Automation expert.
Here’s where knowing yourself comes into play. As you get to discover your personality through a psychometric test in step 1, it becomes clear to you what type of job role suits your interests.
4. Learn In-demand SkillsÂ
Shortlist the most in demand skills for a job role of your choice and start from learning the most basic ones. Quite naturally, it becomes inevitable for individuals to overlook the basic and essential skills and instead get attracted to the hyped ones.Â
That’s why it’s really important to thoroughly research before embarking on a learning path. To state an example here, individuals aspiring to become a data analyst might find it productive to learn database management and analytics starting with SQL and Power BI respectively. However Microsoft Excel standing as a basic requirement for data analyst job roles gets skipped.Â
One way to know the complete list of in demand skills for a job role is through scrutinizing job requirements at job portals. Make it a regular habit to visit Indeed, Glassdoor, Linked In and Google Jobs to find the most common skills advertised for a job role.Â
5. Expand your horizon!
Another interesting way to find the most credible, and comprehensive information regarding both local and international markets is through hearing industry experts, joining communities, and reading career insights.Â
While the above 4 tips can offer you a complete guideline on building an informed and complete career vision, following the below tips bring a further bulge to your vision.
Hear Industry Experts
There are vast freely available webinars where industry experts share their view of the market, salary information, type of work, in-demand skills, job roles and interview questions.
You can join these free webinars and hear career insights straight from experts. It’s an ideal way to glimpse the local and global industry where the trends and culture is truly known by veteran professionals.
Join Community
Today, choice of a career greatly depends on how large its community is. A professional community is an online place where professionals belonging to an industry thrive in a culture of knowledge sharing.
Communities are a great way for novices and experienced professionals to gain working knowledge around their area of interest by sharing and exchanging ideas, solutions and growth opportunities.
Search for and join the official community for your target job role. Ask questions, find solutions to hard-to-solve problems, participate in insightful discussions.Â
For example, a cloud engineer aspiring for an AWS specialization can join the Global AWS community.
Read Career Insights  Â
Career blogs and articles provide deliberate and structured content that provides a complete cover on your career needs.
Google search engine is your ultimate career content tool that provides you the best career blogs and articles out there. You would find your favorite content online and use their name for your future career research.
Dice Insights by Dicecamp is a dedicated platform that features indigenous career guides in the hi-tech domain. At Dice Insights, the content is focused on empowering rookies and professionals to build an ideal career for themselves. Check out career guides at Dice Insights.Â
Dicecamp is your Ultimate Career Toolkit!
Dicecamp is a digital platform by Dice Analytics that builds an enabling hi-tech career support system for job seekers. At Dicecamp ‘Set Track’ is a family of Free Career Tools that educate and empower aspiring youth and experienced professionals to develop, and achieve, a clear and informed career vision.
Learn more about Dicecamp as we launch soon!
