Careers Gateway - Something For The Weekend

What do you do when you ……JUST DON'T KNOW?

A Career. People talk about them a lot. It's not something that comes to everyone straight away. If you have absolutely no idea at all about your own career….don't stress.

Some of your friends may already be talking about becoming doctors, mechanics, chefs or solicitors. Good for them, maybe they are the sort of people who have found out what they want early on. Don't be pushed into a career choice because everyone else had one and you felt left out!

We're not talking pants here!

Choosing a career is not as simple as picking out a new CD or choosing what you want to wear on Saturday night. It will affect you for many years to come. So if you're not interested in 'careers people', 'teachers' or your 'parents' and think that talking to them about your career plans is a complete waste of time, ask yourself this……

"Am I a waste of time?"
"Am I not worth thinking about?"

Because you're worth it!

People are there to help you! They aren't doing it to be clever or annoying. So if you find looking that far into the future difficult, think about this ……..

Look back to a time when there was nothing on the TV, your mates were all out, it was raining, you'd spent all your allowance and you just sat in the lounge going mad with boredom…………..now imagine feeling like that for 40 years! Painful isn't it. Choosing a career carefully will make the difference.

Where do you start?

If you have absolutely no idea what you want to do as a career there are plenty of things you can do to get you started :-

Talk to your parents, relatives and friends and find out about the sorts of jobs that they do. You might find that your Uncle Arthur has a great job that you'd never even heard of. Then again, you might not. But it's worth finding out to help you get some ideas.
Think about school. There might be some subjects that you absolutely love and some that you absolutely hate. This could give you some ideas about jobs that would fit in with them. For example, if you hate drama lessons it's unlikely that you would be happy as an actor. But if you love french lessons you could start looking at careers that require languages like interpreters, teachers or holiday reps. It's also a good idea to look at what you're good at as many careers will need you to have qualifications in that subject.
What do you enjoy. Think about the things that you do out of school. You might be in a band, DJ, help out with children at your local community centre or have a hobby like swimming, reading or collecting something. How do your interests fit in with jobs? Could you be a sports teacher, the next Fatboy Slim or a librarian?
Use your careers / connexions library. This is the place to find out loads about different types of careers and how to get there. Your school or college will have a careers library and you can also visit your local Careers/Connexions centre. They will have lots of books with information about hundreds of careers. You can have a look through them, pick out those that interest you and find out more. This could take a long time, so why not use the computers. They have programmes that help you come up with some ideas by answering questions about yourself. The computer will then try and match careers that might interest you and give you a list. Then you can use other programmes, books or websites to find out more about the ones that really interest you.
Speak to a Connexions / Careers adviser. Again, you can do this at school or college or drop in to your local centre. It's useful to chat with someone about your career options because they too can help guide you towards careers that might suit you. They may also be able to point you in the right direction to the best information in the library.

What are you waiting for?

So don't panic and follow those steps. You will really benefit from spending time thinking about these really important decisions. Once you have found the types of careers that interest you, then you can look into what qualifications you need, the working environment, what experience you need, where there might be jobs, salaries (wages) and anything else you need to do.

Links that may be useful?

Ask in your school or local careers advice office if they have CID, the Careers Information Database, published by Careersoft. This program can be used to generate job ideas from your favourite interests or subjects at school.

Careers Advice can be obtained from your local Connexions Centre / Careers Advice Office, have a look at the Careers / Connexions Service Company addresses on this website to find your local Connexions / Careers Service. Their website may have addresses of local offices, or you can ring them to find out where your nearest centre is.

If you need to find out more information about a particluar job, then use the Career Links section on this site.

Be a step ahead!

Good Luck!

Jennie Glitherow

At school or college? Look out for Jennie's future articles which we'll have here for the first Monday of each month, and which we'll link to the best sites we can find on the Web. Why not bookmark us now?

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