Career Tips: #4 Don’t Ask What You Can Do, Know What You Must do.
The usual starting place for looking for new work is taking an inventory of your skills and interests and seeing how they “match” the job market (i.e. defined occupations). A better place to start is by casting your glance inward…closely examining what you can do, like to do and what and what captures your attention. Finding new work does not and indeed may not be a matching game.
The idea of matching ourselves to an occupation is an approach that has its roots in the 1909 work of Frank Parsons–trait and factor theory, a rational decision-making approach to the process of choosing a career. Parsons was a no-nonsense guy who said that choosing a “vocation” (which is what work was called in the early 1900′s) was simply a matter of understanding yourself, understanding the requirements of the workplace, and employing “true reasoning” in connecting the two. Advice that has withstood the passage of time but could use a bit of updating to make it useful to you today.
Figuring out what you want to do “for a living” is very different from looking for a job that matches your skills and interests. Fortunately today’s work world gives you much more flexibility in designing what, where and how you want to show up for work. So, before you step out into the “job market” spend sometime with yourself…or you may miss the opportunity to discover the work you must do.