Seven Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Career

Students ask, "What career should I choose?" A better question is, "How do I judge a career well?" Good decisions here come from a process you can repeat, not a single moment of certainty.

In short:

• Judge a career by the problems you enjoy, the working day you can bear, and the strengths you have shown more than once.
• Find out what the route actually requires and what the first three years look like before you plan anything.
• Speak to someone already there about last week, not their career, and test the interest before committing.

Before you start, make sure you are choosing from the whole map rather than the handful of professions everybody names — there are a great many jobs nobody in your family has heard of, and several of them may suit you better than the ones on the short list.

1. What kind of problems do I enjoy working on?

Some people like technical problems. Some like helping a person who is in front of them. Some like organising operations, telling stories, or building something that makes money. The pattern is more reliable than any job title.

2. What kind of working day suits me?

Structure or variety? Alone, or with people all day? Fixed hours or unpredictable ones? A career can look excellent from a distance and be unbearable at nine on a Tuesday morning.

3. Which of my strengths are demonstrated?

Build on what has shown up more than once, in school, projects, volunteering, competitions or paid work. Something you have done twice is evidence. Something you feel you would be good at is a guess.

4. What does this path actually require?

Some routes need a specific degree and there is no way round it. Others reward a portfolio, an apprenticeship, a certification, or two years of unglamorous experience. Find out which kind you are looking at before you plan anything else.

Check what is genuinely available and accredited rather than assuming — the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission publishes the institutions and programmes it has accredited — and be clear about which programme actually leads where, because a field and a course are not the same thing.

5. What do people do in the first three years?

Students picture the destination and skip the entrance. Look up the entry-level job title and read what it asks for. That is the part you have to get through, and it usually decides whether you stay.

The International Labour Organization's work on youth employment is a useful corrective here: the routes into work available now differ from the ones your parents describe, and the entry step is where most of that difference shows up.

6. Who can I speak to who is already there?

One honest twenty-minute conversation can correct months of wrong assumptions. Ask about last week rather than about their career.

Weigh what you hear rather than adopting it — confident advice and informed advice sound identical, and telling them apart is a skill. A mentoring conversation built on a specific question will get you considerably further than one that opens with "what should I do with my life".

7. What can I test before committing?

Shadow someone, join a club, volunteer, take a short introductory course, finish one small project. Interests get clearer when you test them, and stay foggy for as long as you only think about them.

The most useful version of this is a placement you chose deliberately — a few weeks inside the work will tell you more than a year of reading about it.

Using the seven

Answer all seven in writing for the two options you are torn between. The weaker option usually collapses at question four or five, and you will be able to say why.

And if the answer turns out to be that you chose wrong, that is worth knowing early rather than late — changing direction is usually a turn rather than a fresh start.

On eStudent360 you can put question six to a verified mentor through Ask a Mentor, without booking a session. For question four, the learning pathways set out what each route requires and what the first years involve. If you are stuck before question one, the guidance wizard is six short questions and a place to start.

Frequently asked

What if I have no idea what I want to do? That is normal. Start with question one and question three, which only need evidence you already have, and run one small test from question seven. Direction usually follows doing, not thinking.

How do I find out what a job is really like? Ask someone who does it to describe last Tuesday. Shadowing, volunteering or a short course settles more than a year of reading.