Career coaching: Six ways to help find a job you love this year

A huge 65% of my clients reach out to me because they feel stuck in a job or career they no longer enjoy. One common factor that often keeps them feeling stuck is not knowing what to do instead. If you are currently stuck in a job you don’t like, but struggling to figure out what else you could be good at or enjoy, here are some steps to help get you started.

Step 1 – Your Motivators

To stay fulfilled in a job, it is essential we feel motivated on a daily basis. To figure out what motivates us, we must first gain an understanding of our values. Our values are what drive us. Our motivators if you will. If we’re not experiencing these on a regular basis within our current roles, we will find it hard to get out of bed in the morning. A few examples of values could be:

This is just a small list of examples to help get those cogs turning. Think about your own personal values and write down a list of 10 – 20. Then out of that list pick a top 7. This is your list of key motivators. Make sure when you think about your career, you choose a role that will allow you to experience most, if not all, of these top values on a regular basis.

Step 2 – Your Skills

Go through your career history on your CV as well as your life experiences and think about all of the skills you have picked up along the way. Look at technical, practical or manual skills, as well as interpersonal and behavioural skills (including leadership, sales, negotiation, conflict management, problem-solving, public-speaking etc.). Think about your skills around formulating a vision, strategies, ideas and creating change, and those around data, such as the analysis, presentation, evaluation or interpretation of data. Build a list of everything you can think of from both your career and personal experiences.

Step 3 – Ability and Enjoyment

Looking at your skills list, assess which ones are you good at and enjoy. Give each one a mark out of 10 for ability and enjoyment. Ideally you want to choose a career that encompasses skills you are both good at and enjoy (e.g. a 7 and a 7 or above). As you’re doing this, ask yourself which ones would you like to do more of in your job compared to what you are doing now. If there are any that you really enjoy but not necessarily good at, make a note that these could be added to your personal development plan.

Step 4 – Achievements

By looking at what we have achieved, we can often get further insights into what we are good at, what we enjoy and our values. The key here is to think about the skills you used to achieve the accomplishment AND what was important to you about that achievement. Is it something you want to continue achieving in the future? Would achieving that consistently in your career drive you? If yes, write it down.

Step 5 – Purpose

To stay in a career, we must feel a sense of purpose. What would give you that? What career would make you feel you were doing the right thing? How do you want to be contributing to a team, an organisation, to a group of individuals or the world? What learning and development would you want to experience in order to feel your career had purpose?

Steps 1 to 5 are essentially to help you create a list of criteria for your next career. Chances are these will have given you some clarity on what you need to be doing and experiencing on a day-to-day basis in order to feel fulfilled in your career. With these new insights, you can start to brainstorm what kind of careers you would like to pursue. The final step?

Step 6 – Action

Ask yourself – what action can I take today to help me move closer to my new career? Look at all of the resources available to you – people, education, the internet, publications, money, time etc. – to find out more about what your new career choice entails and what steps you need to take to get there. If you want some guidance on how to change careers, a career coach will show you the necessary steps and work with you to build an effective career change strategy.