How to Make a Great Career Choice

Recent graduates and career changers ask themselves, “What type of career should I choose?” Although excited about choosing a meaningful direction in life, they also feel uncertain about the right path to take.

Virtual assistant

If you’re unsure what you want to do for a living, overwhelmed by your options, get creative. Explore novel options. Today, it’s easy to research any career. Read about different ones in books or magazines. Go surfing online. Talk to people in the field.

Here are three examples of interesting careers.

1. Travel Physical Therapist

This is a wonderful career if you’re interested in healthcare and love to travel.

Physical therapy professionals help people overcome debilitating medical conditions, injuries, or disabilities and live more independently. While most physical therapists work at one clinic for years, it’s also possible to become a travel physical therapist, getting assignments from medical staffing companies to work anywhere in the country.

The stimulation of travel while working in a demanding profession is a natural antidote to career burnout.

2. Virtual Assistant

This is a dream career if you’re a natural organizer.

When you walk into an office, you feel an irresistible impulse to transform chaos into order. You want to get rid of clutter, make plans, decide on priorities, resolve conflicting schedules, and plot projects on a Gantt Chart in Excel. You enjoy organizing documents in file cabinets, scheduling meetings, coordinating travel plans, and, generally, making everything run like clockwork. If that’s you, being a virtual assistant may just be your dream job.

Since many small business owners are visionaries, people who see the big picture, they miss the details that cobble their grand plans together. They need someone like you to mind the office while they build their business.

Virtual assistants are often initially hired for simple tasks such as data entry, customer service, and event planning. Later, they can advance to assist with more complex tasks, such as project management and administrative work.

This specialized work is a cost-effective solution for managing a business, and much of it can be done remotely as an independent contractor.

Human behavior researcher

3. Researcher

This is a stimulating career if you’re a brainiac or just love a good mystery.

When working on anything, whether it’s for school or work, you quickly figure out schemas and how things fit together. When watching a movie, you predict how the plot will unfold halfway through the drama. In school, you watched Netflix the night before the final while everyone else crammed. At a new, you performed impeccably within the first week. If so, being a researcher can be very rewarding.

While a knack for pattern recognition has its benefits, it also has its downside. Once you’ve passed the thrill of novelty, you’re quickly bored. While other people are orienting to a new situation, you’ve already observed what’s important, oriented to novel stimuli, and decided on the best course of action.

What you need is a challenging line of work, becoming a researcher will push you past the boundaries of the known and let you dabble in the unknown.

First, decide what fields interest you. For instance, if you’re fascinated by psychology, then you could carve out a career in this field by exploring bewildering phenomena like dissociative personality disorder. A degree from a prestigious institution isn’t necessary for every field, but for some, it will keep you from being underestimated by institutions hiring researchers.

How to Decide What’s Best for You

Choosing a career is all about looking at your own personal interests and aptitudes. It is about figuring out what you are good at and what you will enjoy doing for decades. Do your research. Ponder life’s riddles. Ask probing questions. Find your niche in life.

There are many factors to consider. What are you good at? What type of work do you love to do? What level of income do you need? What opportunities are available for you in your preferred geographical area in your field of interest? Once you answer some of these important questions, you’ll be well on your way to a rewarding and stimulating career.

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