© 2010, Dr. Thomas J. Denham, Careers In Transition LLC

My clients sometimes say, “I just don’t know what I want.”  Most of them are just confused.  They actually do know what they want; they are just having a crisis of choice given all the many options available today.  There are 2 ways to pick your career.

The first way is Inductive Career Decision-Making where you start with a list of specific jobs and then look for the patterns that emerge into a general field you are considering.  I use a resource called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles which has over 1,600 jobs listed.  I ask my clients to review the entire list and then pick their top 25 jobs.  We then discuss it and break it down to a top ten list.  Next, we prioritize the list into three to five jobs to pursue for their job search and then develop a plan of action.

The second ways is just the opposite.  Deductive Career Decision-Making is where you begin with general career fields, then subcategories that further lead to specific jobs.  Dr. John Holland devised a way of organizing personality differences into a classification system called the Self-Directed Search (SDS).  He argued that jobs can be grouped into six themes:

To Read the Full Article Click Here