Research

Review past successful roles, volunteer work, projects and jobs to identify preferred activities and skills. 

Determine whether your core values and skills are addressed through your current career. 

Brainstorm ideas for career alternatives by researching career options, and discussing your core values and skills with friends, family, and networking contacts. 

If you’re having difficulty coming up with ideas, consider meeting with a career counselor for professional advice.

Explore jobs that interest you and ask yourself how do my skills and interests match up with these jobs?

• Where are the gaps?
• What options do I have to gain these skills or qualify for these jobs?
• What skills do I need?
• Where is the work?

You will now have a list of preferred jobs and/or learning options.

Ask yourself:

• What are my best work/training options?
• How do they match with my skills, interests and values?
• How do they fit with the current jobs market? How do they fit with my current situation and responsibilities?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each option?
• What will help and what will hinder me?What can I do about it?

A person with a foundation of knowledge and skills will make more money and most likely live a more meaningful life.
There’s a similar belief in start-ups: technology companies focus on learning over profitability in the early years to maximize revenue in the later years.

Prioritize plans that offer the best chance at learning about yourself and the world. Ask yourself, “Which plan offers the most learning potential?”

Any entrepreneur (and any expert on cognition / learning) will tell you that practical knowledge is best developed by doing, not just thinking or planning.

For careers, too, you don’t know what the best plan is until you try. 

We tend to only do something about our careers when we have a problem. But if you wait until you’re laid off or dissatisfied, you may take action but it won’t feel authentic.

A better way is to look at multiple factors and work on them consistently even when you feel satisfied at your job.

"Incremental efforts add up. You don’t have to do a big dramatic thing to make progress. What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while."

The key to completing your SWOT analysis is to treat your career as a business and yourself as a competitive product.

• Create a full inventory of expenses in front of you: Categorize them into fixed and variable; urgent and non-urgent; necessities and luxury; avoidable and unavoidable.
• You can create a hierarchy of needs and decide which one’s to address first. It’s all about prioritizing. 
• Accept that you have limited resources and unlimited wants. But you have to manage your resources. The sooner you accept this fact, the better you can control your impulses towards avoidable expenditures.

It’s a statement wherein you can jot down your assets and liabilities.

• Pull together your bank statements and other proofs of the liabilities
• List down your assets like the bank balance, all investments, home value, and value of other assets.
• Take a sum of all the assets to arrive at the total value of your assets.
• List down your liabilities the (car loan, home loan, credit card balances etc.)
• The sum of all the liabilities will show the value of the money you owe.
• When you subtract the value of liabilities from assets, you get your Net Worth.
  

1. Include the right people: anyone who can assist you with a career move
2. Know what your career network can do for you
3. Keep in touch - work your network: People are more willing to help when they know who you are
4. Give to get - what can you do for your career network
5. Keep track of your network: 

   make sure you know who is who, where they work, and how to get in touch.

6. Network online
7. Attend networking events.

These folks are visionaries who get energy and solve problems by asking and answering the question, ‘where do we intend to go and why?’ It is common to find these strengths with strategists, marketers, and CEOs.

• Thinking strategically: The ability to see past today’s issues and focus on a longer term destination.
• Setting a visionary destination: The ability to establish a positive future in the minds of others that doesn’t exist today.
• Thinking inventively: The ability to conceptualize a working solution that can ultimately convert into a tangible product-service offering.
• Generating imaginative ideas: The ability to see and articulate possibilities that are not purely grounded in experience.
• Thinking creatively: The ability to offer new thoughts on subject areas that others have not considered.
• Pioneering new ideas: The ability to create a new line of thought that has not yet been proven in practice.
• Brainstorming new ideas: The ability to work with others to co-create new ideas and new solutions.

In this ever-changing marketplace, chances are you’ll never feel 100% prepared. 

If your next step is unclear, the best way to find clarity is to move forward. Your view of the situation and potential solutions will be clearer when you're in the middle of it rather than when you’re on the outside looking in.

Pay attention to those activities that feel scary - they're usually your next stretch goal waiting to be tackled.

You might make mistakes, but your other option is to do nothing and remain stagnant.