With thousands of options, how will you choose a career that's right for you? If you don't have any idea what you want to do, the task may seem insurmountable. Fortunately, it isn't. Follow an organized process and you will increase your chances of making a good decision.
Before you can choose the right career, you must learn about yourself. Your values, interests, soft skills, and aptitudes, in combination with your personality type, make some occupations a good fit for you and others completely inappropriate.
Use self-assessment tools, and career tests to gather information about your traits and, subsequently, generate a list of occupations that are a good fit based on them. Some people choose to work with a career counselor or other career development professionals who can help them navigate this process.
You probably have multiple lists of occupations in front of you at this point—one generated by each of the self-assessment tools you used. To keep yourself organized, you should combine them into one master list.
First, look for careers that appear on multiple lists and copy them onto a blank page. Title it "Occupations to Explore." Your self-assessments ​indicated they are a good fit for you based on several of your traits, so they're definitely worth exploring.
Next, find any occupations on your lists that appeal to you. They may be careers you know a bit about and want to explore further. Also, include professions about which you don't know much. You might learn something unexpected.
At this point, you'll be thrilled you managed to narrow your list down to only 10 to 20 options. Now you can get some basic information about each of the occupations on your list.
Find job descriptions and educational, training, and licensing requirements in published sources. Learn about advancement opportunities. Use government-produced labor market information to get data about earnings and job outlook.
Now you have more information, start to narrow down your list even further. Based on what you learned from your research so far, begin eliminating the careers you don't want to pursue any further. You should end up with two to five occupations on your "short list."