A career change is an interesting journey — it always begins with the same question: what to do next? That’s the very first question one asks his or herself before considering a career transition. But how does that question come up? Well, first it’s a matter of how you feel. You are unhappy with your current daily bore and want to start again in a new exciting adventure.

The trick is that it takes a lot of thought when making such choices, and a career change is one of those delicate life shifts that can change your life for better or worse. This isn’t something you can decide in a few minutes, unfortunately, not even in a few days. This is something you need to put aside time for doing research and to set new goals in life.

And that is why asking yourself deep, detailed questions is the right way to go about it.

1. What is your goal in life?

Your goal in life is to make money or to have free time to do what you please? Of course these are extremes sides to the spectrum, so it’ll be key that you apply yourself to create balance. The goal is to find some skills that you can perform very well and that you enjoy doing. Yet, you also need to have an influx of discipline and temperance to actually attain the goal.

2. What is my plan?

This means having deadlines on doing what is required and necessary to make your ultimate decision. For example, you need to search for listings of job boards like Indeed.com and uncover the jobs that interest you. Think about their fields, salaries, work-life balance, locations, etc. This can be done in about three days after your workday. The next activity is to extract the data from the job descriptions and see if you can find a way to get more experience (for instance, you could ask a entrepreneur if you can shadow him or her for a day). That process can easily take about three days as well. It might be helpful to consider a career agency to help you with the job hunt. If you want to find your dream job, then outsourcing might be the best way to save yourself some time and energy in the long run.

3. What can you bring to the table?

You probably have experience in some field, or taken some courses. Your objective is to associate these skills with your career change, or develop new skills. For instance, if you are a project manager on a construction project, you may need to familiarize yourself with equipment rental management software or tools as part of the job. In many cases you want to learn the tools necessary for the job before fully taking the leap to make a career change.

4. Manage your network

With the internet and smartphones, you can be social, and make a career change through your acquaintances through social media and chatting. Your contacts can help locate opportunities that aren’t public.

5. Analyze different mediums to look for jobs

It is not just the newspaper job section, there are dozens of job databases on the net. You can get email subscriptions every day from different sites, and apply for different positions. Even though you receive email updates specially filtered to your interests, it will take a long time to read through each job description of each new opportunity, that is why you may need to contact a placement company, they can do this job for you.

6. How can you prepare yourself best?

The skills you have will be applied to your next job, just in a different way. You just need to revamp your current resume by rewording some sentences to highlight certain aspects of things that you have done. Professional resume writing services can rewrite it, and they will refocus it based on your career change. Also, sometimes it just comes down to how you brand yourself. Read up on marketing blogs like Hubspot’s marketing blog for tips and tricks for social media and the like.

7. What do you enjoy?

Finding what you enjoy is not something that everybody is familiar with — it’s not a simple task for people who aren’t fully self-aware. Many times people will never find that particular interest because they didn’t do enough exploring or searching. You need to find what makes you happy through reflection and brainstorming. For example, you may find that you enjoy budgeting. If you do, then maybe a career as an accountant will be right for you. You won’t know until you ask yourself the tough questions.

8. What are recent job trends? Projected job trends?

One of the most important aspects of your set of assignments is to search for different statistics on your interested job or set of jobs. You need to know several data points, such as the current number of people employed in that position, and how much demand is expected to grow in the next five years (you can check the BLS for that type of information quite easily). Economists and other experts have done these calculations for you already; they base their assessments on scientific research they’ve either read or developed.

Conclusion

New job research has several aspects to watch out for. You need to read job descriptions and match your current skills, rewrite your resume, and network with your contacts. Maybe you also need new training for the new job. All these choices are based on your interests, yet you also should add job trend information into the decision compound matrix.

The internet can be very useful for career change purposes as you probably already know…