At this time of year, many people are thinking of changing career. However, it’s very easy to make the wrong career choice and at this stage of your life mistakes can be time-consuming and costly. Good, professional careers advice is strongly advised in order to avoid falling into the trap of drifting into an unsuitable career path.
Potentially the career pitfalls are destructive. A lot of boxes need to be ticked in order to make the best career change for you. Let’s look first at practicalities. If you are making a career change, then it is assumed that you have already had a career in the past, so you need to look carefully at why you want to make that career change.
Is it that you have become disinterested in the career that you were doing? Is there a ceiling you can’t break through? Have you fallen out of love with the organisation? Careers advice based on psychology and psychometric testing will help you untangle these issues.
Or is it more to do with your personal circumstances? Do you want to spend more time with family? Do you have another career in mind or a hobby or project you want to indulge? Maybe you want to travel and see more of the world or maybe you feel you want to give something back to the world and offer yourself more selflessly. Getting serious career advice from an occupational psychologist will do much more than help you pick through these considerations.
There are a lot of other factors to consider and that is where psychometric tests come in. If you are going to make a career change at this stage, you might as well do the job properly. Time is running out to re-address this issue in another couple of years, so you should aim to get it right this time.
Getting good career advice can help you identify important aspects other than practicalities. Have you considered how much your own personality impacts your career choice? Or your values and beliefs – maybe they’ve changed over the years? Or your interests. How motivated are you to succeed? How driven are you. Did you know that these personal factors can actually be measured and quantified using psychometric tests?
You must be careful here because only fully qualified occupational psychologists are able to interpret the results of these psychometric tests and give proper careers advice based on the results. So, doing an online career test with a computer-generated report will not suffice. The real psychometric tests take up to five hours to complete so don’t take the short cut.
Once you have completed the questionnaires, the occupational psychologist will study the results and draw some preliminary conclusions about what careers advice would be most appropriate for you. After that, you can sit down together, discuss those career options and formulate a career plan for the next stage of your life.
Good luck.
