How Singapore job hunters can pick the best career option

As a career counsellor in Singapore, I often get asked questions such as:

• What job suits me?
• What career is best for me?
• How do I choose a career?

From students in school who are confused about educational choices, to experienced professionals looking to make a career change, this is an issue that concerns quite a few people.

To help you solve this dilemma, I would like to offer a 3 step DIY approach:

1. Understanding your characteristics and preferences, which are important for career decision making: This includes your personality, interests, values, skills and goals/constraints.
2. Short listing a few career options that match your characteristics and preferences
3. Researching shortlisted career options.

Let's start with the first step

The easiest, quickest and most affordable way to learn about yourself, is to use a few high quality career assessments. All you need to do is answer a series of questions and the assessments will give you details about yourself, along with matching career options.

I've included some recommendations below, which won't burn a hole in your pocket.

• Personality: Keirsey Temperament Sorter, Career Maze, MBTI.
• Interests: Cambell Interest & Skills Survey, Testing Room, Career Key.
• Values: Testing Room, Work Importance Profiler.
• Skills: Cambell Interest & Skills Survey, Career Key.

Moving on to the second step of the process

After you take a few of the assessments, make a note of the career suggestions that meet more than one preference/characteristic. This list can then be shortlisted further by removing options that don't meet your goals/constraints (e.g. location restrictions, use of previous experience/education, salary requirements and so on).

And finally

To complete the process, it is crucial that you research the shortlisted careers. The goal of the research is:

• Re-confirm if the options are a good fit for you.
• Learn more about the entry requirements, educational options and employers.
• Understand what the typical career path looks like.
• Answer any other practical questions/concerns you might have.

This step is very important to reduce uncertainty, get familiar with the career options and become more confident of choosing one of them.

Start by conducting secondary research using a good occupational database. A good database will provide a wealth of detailed information about almost any career. The best one I know of is the ONET.

Then you need to engage in 'low risk experiments' to get first hand information. This involves things like relevant volunteer work, job shadowing, internships, short courses and speaking with people who have worked in the field.

That's it. Good luck!