Jobs - Planning Your New Career for 2008

How many of you are looking for new jobs, planning to escape once and for all from the rut you’ve been in for years? A surprisingly high number of people of working age are unhappy in their current jobs and the beginning of the year is one of the times when this dissatisfaction tends to bubble up. If you are really serious about making a career change, it’s critical that you don’t just dash off and apply for a new job because you made a New Year’s Resolution to do so.

The decision itself is just the first step - it might take weeks or even years to get to your final destination. So give yourself a pat on the back for having made having taken the initial decision, but don’t chastise yourself just because you can’t see a major transformation on the last day of January.

It’s critical that you come up with a career plan, which includes realistic short and long term goals. This strategy will enable you to remain both focused and motivated. Sometimes those long term goals feel incredibly remote and so you end up thinking they are impossible, but if you plan the way forward in small, manageable chunks, you’ll find they become surprisingly achievable.

Imagine that your ideal career is working in alternative medicine and that you’d really like to become an acupuncturist, osteopath or homoeopath, careers which now demand degree level study. Right now this feels as if it is an impossible dream. But by looking at it more closely, you’ll see that you are dealing with two main issues: time and money - and this applies to any career that you might be considering.

If you study both of these aspects of career change , you will soon see that there is more than one way forward. Take studying, many colleges offer part-time course, either on-site or by distance learning. You can pay for studies in any of the following ways, or perhaps using a combination of them: student loans, scholarships, grants, savings, borrowing from family, downsizing and selling off possessions you don’t want. If you are returning to study after the kids have left home, you might be in a position to sell your home and move to a smaller one.

If you don’t have much money, you could start by taking one or two modules and building credits. Or you could think about starting out in a related career which doesn’t need so much training. Learning skills like Reiki or massage is usually in the form of intensive courses and although these can be quite expensive, the advantage is that you can keep your full-time job. Once qualified, you can set yourself up as a practitioner and if you decide that the first goal is still for you, you can still get your degree, once you’ve set aside a little cash and have experience, both of working in complementary medicine and in self employment, both of which will be huge advantages.

Start out by looking at the overall picture and examine different routes to your ultimate goal, choosing the one which is best for your present situation in life.

You should be able to identify some goals which can be achieved quickly. Here are a couple of examples you could complete in the next months or two, depending on your present commitments: get in touch with local practitioners and ask if you can have a chat over lunch or coffee (you pay!)This will give you an inside view of the career, including insights into how to reach your goal more quickly.

A goal for the next six months might be completing a short course, such as an intro to anatomy and physiology or the basics of setting up a small business, either of which would give you great career information, and even help you decide if you’ve made the right decision before you go ahead and invest more time and money.

Once you are convinced the decision is the right one, you can go ahead and make longer term goals.

Starting with the final goal in mind and moving back towards the present will help you to judge which steps you should take in order to progress at the pace which is right for you. If you are determined to succeed in changing jobs, planning is important if you want to achieve long term job satisfaction.

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