How to choose a Career or Job - Ideas No1 Life Analysis (Update 28 July 2011)

Choosing the right career or job (or change of career etc) is a basis for happiness so it would make sense to think about your mind-set with the view to fixing the right future for yourself. It is probably quite easy to review your past in terms of experience-based knowledge, skills, insights, contacts, etc. The quality and nature of your mindset may not be so readily apparent to you - this will be considered in Ideas No 2.

Firstly, I suggest that you explore your past with the view to learning about yourself - your own life analysis. A step-by-step approach might be adopted as follows:

1. Collect events or dates about your life and record them in a loose leaf folder - indicating their importance, if any, to your personal development;
2. Collect personal papers, eg old passports, educational certificates, sports awards, testimonials, school reports, etc;
3. Recollect facts and insights from travel - business, work or leisure, eg about languages, countries, customs, etc;
4. Collect or make notes of important happenings, role models, etc from in your past - some may be historic, sporting, etc figures who examples gave you insights and so on;
5. Talk to colleagues, friends and relatives (as and when) about the past and what they can rember about your early days - make notes of snippets and insights gained;
6. Make a list of former work or business contacts, making a note of any memories of important work-related or business-related insights given;
7. Make a list of authors or books which have helped to shape or sharpen insights into identified knowledge, skills; and,
8. List your accomplishments or "track record" from early times, eg school-days, work, business, military, volunteer opportunities, sport or leisure etc.

If you have a particular potential career or job in mind you might like to use the contents of your folder for a personal SWOT analysis, ie relating the analysis to the career and / or job .