Steps to finding the Right Career for You

While it will likely change over time, focusing on a certain career path can help inform your decisions about your professional growth as you gain skills and experience. It’s important to reflect on your interests, skills and career goals as you make certain life choices such as which school to apply for, which entry-level job is right for you, whether to get a post-graduate degree or specialized certification and more.

In this article, I will focus on how to identify your key skills and interests, match those qualities to a potential job field and start a career.

1- WRITE DOWN CAREER GOALS

Before selecting a career, start with self-reflection by asking and answering certain questions. Active reflection helps narrows your choices into something more specific.

Consider asking yourself:

  • What do I want from my career?
  • What are my core values?
  • What activities do I most enjoy, professionally or in my free time?
  • What are my interests?
  • What are my strengths and aptitudes? Soft skills? Hard skills?
  • Do I want to specialize in certain technical skills or take on management roles?

Once you answer questions like these (and any others that are important to you), you can better research potential careers paths. It’s also important to revisit your career goals as you grow personally and professionally to ensure your goals remain achievable and aligned with your interests.

2- Set one short term & one long term goal

Once you have narrowed down your options, consider establishing milestones for your career. Research where other people in your field are at five or ten years into their career, and make note of the job titles they have. Decide what title or advancements you want to have at these future points. Then research what you can do to reach those goals. You may need to undergo training programs, take on specific responsibilities or hold prerequisite positions.

By establishing career goals five or ten years in the future, you can plan based on what progress you should expect every year. Schedule time regularly to reflect on your career and goals.

3- Identify your Personality Type

A personality type is a set of personality traits that can be grouped together. There are multiple methods for discovering your personality type, many of which focus on your responses to different situations. Different personality types may naturally gravitate toward different interests and develop different strengths, including careers.

Different tests list common career choices for each personality type. If you take a variety of tests and one or two careers appear across multiple tests, that specific career is likely worth researching.

4- Did you enjoy your previous job/internship?

Your job satisfaction in previous roles can also help guide your career choices. Identify trends in your previous positions, such as focusing on a specific technical skill. Also, review your job history to identify positions that you felt fulfilled in.

5- Educate yourself with the Job requirements – skills, knowledge, interests,etc

Many jobs have specific education requirements for applicants and new hires, such as obtaining a high school diploma, completing a bachelor’s degree program or having a master’s degree. Some positions also require applicants to have their degrees in a specific field related to the position.

Review the education requirements for jobs you are interested in, and apply for jobs that accept your current level of education or research additionally degrees or certifications you may need.

6- Work on gaining expertise in the skills you already possess

Make a list of your current skills, certifications and areas of expertise. Also ask for feedback about your technical, interpersonal and people management skills from coworkers and colleagues. This evaluation can help you find careers that match what you are best at.

7- If you can choose your interest as your career,what will it be?

Depending on your personality, you may have interests that lend themselves to different careers. Examine your hobbies, past volunteer experiences and interests to identify activities or fields you enjoy. While this information is outside of a professional context, creating a list of activities you like can help you focus a career search. For example, you may enjoy a career in cybersecurity if you enjoy logic puzzles, or you may enjoy a traveling sales role if you like meeting new people.

Use this knowledge to apply for short-term positions or volunteer opportunities to explore new career options. This first-hand experience allows you to test your suitability for a career. If you are currently in school or have a job, consider taking a course or certification program that is required for a field that interests you. This experience can help you determine if the career’s skills and content are something you enjoy.

8- Consider your salary needs

Depending on your lifestyle, you may require a certain salary. Find average salaries by job title, company and location on salaries. This can be a good starting point for determining how much money you may have when first starting out, as well as your earning potential after you’ve gained a certain amount of time and experience. While salary certainly does not equal an engaging, satisfying job, it is an important factor to consider when mapping out your career path.

Track2Training – Training Youth for Future Jobs

Importance of training employees for your organization

To fully understand how to deliver great training, it’s vital to know why training is significant for employees. We’ve created an infographic that highlights the importance of training employees in an organization:

Importance of training employees

1. Improves employee performance

The prime motivator for employee training is to improve productivity and performance. And when executed well, it does just that. It provides your employees with the expertise they need to fulfil their role and make a positive impact on your business. The skills they learn empower them to deliver a better quality of work with a fast turnaround rate. 

It also gives your hires a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities within your organization. They know their targets and they’re equipped with the tools to effectively meet them. 

2. Increases engagement

Engaged employees have an increased level of productivity – it’s as simple as that! Through training, you’re continuously engaging your employees and enabling them to engage back. There is two-way communication, opinions and internal workings are shared, meaning your employees are always up to date with what’s going on. This makes them more emotionally invested. They care about their role and are more willing to commit their time and energy to the company.

3. Improves employee retention and growth

It’s common knowledge that the hiring and onboarding process can be a costly and time-consuming task. And a powerful by-product of increased performance and engagement through training is improved employee retention

Training boosts a feeling of value in employees. It shows that you’re committed to providing them with the resources needed to ensure they’re doing a good job. In turn, they’re more likely to enjoy their work and remain in your organization for longer. It also nurtures them further in their career within your organization. One of the biggest benefits is that you’ll have more opportunities to hire from within, reducing recruiting and onboarding costs for your business.

4. Consistency in training

Creating consistency within an organization is difficult. But training helps reduce a disparity between your teams. Each employee has a baseline knowledge of their individual and their team’s goals, putting everyone on the same page. Additionally, employees all receiving the same training means they share responsibility and are aware of their role on the team.

5. Tracks employee skills

With eLearning, particularly with a learning management system (LMS), you can track the training your employees have taken. This has two big advantages.

Through insightful reports, you know if your employees are up to date with their training. Reports are a powerful tool if you’re delivering onboarding training or have to prove training has taken place, as is usually the case for compliance training. Tracking your training also helps you to provide better training for your employees. It enables you to identify what they are and aren’t engaging with. So, you can improve your course content based on these insights, ensuring that your employees get better training overall.

6. Address internal weaknesses

A lack of awareness of internal weakness is a hazardous thing within an organization. Training overcomes this as you can educate your employees on important subjects that help overcome and avoid any issues. Additionally, it creates a knowledge-sharing environment – your employees learn from managements’ and each others’ past mistakes and wins. This ensures that recurring mistakes are reduced and your employees know the strategies for success.

7. Happier customers

Perhaps the most impactful aspect of employee training is its beneficial effect on your business’s growth. Simply put, better-trained employees make more productive team members, that serve your customers better. The result of this is that your customer retention increases – happier customers stick around for longer and buy more. This can powerfully fuel your business’s growth.

Discover how to start training your employees

With such great results, it’s essential you start your employee training strategy. Find out how to get started in our guide to employee training from Track2Training.

Importance of Career Counseling

After important milestones in education all folks faces this question ‘what next’ after class 10th, after class 12th and after graduation. Career counseling can help altogether the main milestones in one’s career. Firstly, to make a decision a stream and subject combinations, to make a decision the graduation course, and then, to make a decision the post graduation and career option

In school a helpless 16 year old is faced with the selection of varied streams – Humanities, Science with mathematics, science with biology and Commerce, and therefore the only career guidance he has is the opinion of his parents, his teacher’s judgment based on his marks and the comments of his friends and neighbors. A class 11th -12th student together with his subject combinations is flooded with agencies providing various entrance preparation and colleges luring his / her attention. What help he has parents, teachers and admission counselors whose only job is to put the scholar in college and course where they’re going to get commission. A graduate who is doing the course because the oldsters wants him/ her to try to to it or he wasn’t sure of the other and thus is doing the course is also confused about career choices.

We strive to form a progressive world today, where technologies are booming there are many opportunities with various fields where one can make a far better career so guidance provides guidance to an individual to possess a transparent glimpse on what to pursue and the way much duration it takes to finish the course and costs .In today’s world there are also multiple career choices starting from medicine to mass communications, engineering to event management, marine biology to information technology, culinary arts to music.

Choosing a field of study that’s not really suited to your interests or skills could prove disastrous. And that’s where career counseling comes in.

How career counseling works?

Career Counseling involves scientifically developed aptitude tests and personality tests that helps a career counselor give the simplest suited career advice to the scholar supported his report of his aptitude and personality. Human capacities are infinite and may never be measured, nor are we to gauge of what one can do. Every person has unique characteristics, for everybody has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. The key is to identify these unique qualities is through Psychometric Test and career counseling.

What does career counseling offer?

Making an Informed Choice to Choose a Career

Career counseling sessions helps the students to know the pros and cons of the different streams, courses and educational options and the career path it offers, thus the students can make an informed choice, and obtain a career assessment that helps avoid the danger of change in career path later in life. The importance of pinpointing the work cut out for every person can only be gauged when one sees the agony of utmost job misfits. So a career counseling and guidance is needed to help organize ones thoughts and ideas on career related decisions. It can boost the morale and confidence and provides new directions to the scholars which can be beneficial for the entire society. Career counseling helps students discover their true potential and interest in various subjects so as to assist them choose the proper career. Several institutes, including schools and colleges, today offer guidance through a series of aptitude and IQ tests. The tests usually have multiple-choice questions, which don’t got to be prepared for in any way.

Guidance to students

Career counseling is that the guidance given to a student on the road he/she should fancy achieve his/her goals. The advice and counseling provided is predicated on three deciding factors — personality, aptitude and interest.

No confusions

Friends and family can fairly often provide incorrect guidance because their parameters of judging a career choice might differ. A counselor is objective while giving guidance, with no considerations aside from aptitude and interest.

Job Satisfaction

Choosing a career that matches one’s aptitude and personality itself translates into professional success and recognition . The main aim of guidance is to assist students choose a field that’s in tune with their skills and their job expectations. Thus, with the assistance of guidance , most candidates find yourself choosing the proper career, and perform their utmost , which ultimately helps them succeed.

Though not many faculties in India give guidance to students, if your school doesn’t provide you professional counselors, you’ll always seek the assistance of independent counselors. It is always better to hunt professional guidance instead of choose something that the entire herd goes for.

Challenges Associated with Career Counseling

Encouraging Parents and students to take part in counseling is very difficult as people still have a perception that it is time-consuming.

For example in India, there are still 60% of individuals who don’t take career advice 70% of individuals under 14 say they need had no careers advice while 45% of people over 14 have had no or very poor/limited advice.

Over the previous couple of years, there has been a rise within the number of scholars choosing courses aside from engineering. While this is often a positive sign, there’s no doubting the very fact that engineering still remains a dominant choice of scholars pursuing higher studies.

People in India still have a perception that Government service is a secure career so they hesitate to take part in counseling sessions.
Financial problems often provide a drawback in students career even if he/she is good in studies students they visit the career fairs but fails for admissions due to lack of money.

Block chain Technology- Implementations

You must have heard a lot about the emergence of blockchain, isin’t? But here in this article, we will focus on the practical issues for blockchain implementation.

Introduction

In the tech world, blockchain technology is still the leading buzzword. Its ability to work in a distributed environment without getting tampered is the core source behind all the hypes.

As the technology is still in its developing phase, despite various possibilities in almost every sector, it will still take some course of time to get over all the challenges it is facing right now. Let’s explore what the practical blockchain implementation issues are.

As blockchain is revolutionizing rapidly, its scope and career opportunities are beyond imagination. If you are looking to start a profession in blockchain space and want to become a blockchain expert or a blockchain developer, favorable chances are on its way.

Practical Blockchain Implementation Issues

Blockchain technology is an algorithmic immutable ledger that presents a future-ready architecture for organizations to transact and exchange business-related information securely.

Does it mean it has no challenges? Of course not. There are various challenges associated when it comes to implementation. So let’s get started.

Lack of Internal Blockchain Knowledge

The first and foremost challenge while implementing blockchain is that most organizations have insufficient knowledge about technology. Companies do not have Blockchain experts and professionals who clearly understand the core concept of technology.

Thus organizations find it challenging to choose and adopt the best enterprise blockchain platform. Moreover, the companies are not aware of blockchain implementation steps that should guarantee the best outcome.

High Implementation Cost

Although popular enterprise blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric have made great strides in terms of the transaction speeds( just about twice the rate over VISA platform), most of the existing platforms such as Bitcoin(transacts 3 to 5 transactions per second ) and Ethereum (up to 15 transactions per second ) are inefficient in terms of speed of transactions and the energy consumption. Thus we can infer that the most convenient blockchain platforms come at a vast implementation and energy costs.

Backup and Recovery

Backup and recovery of data for blockchain networks are also one of the significant implementation issues. Although theoretically, creating a new node is easy, but it’s not practical spending several hours for a new node to sync with existing blockchain nodes and transfer configuration metadata. The recovery becomes even more critical when there is a requirement to migrate a node across datacenters.

Data privacy

Data privacy is a crucial bottleneck problem in blockchain as most enterprises do not appreciate the case where anyone can view their sensitive data, which might be delicate to their core business. Those who plan to share confidential business data are worried about confidentiality between several participants and shielding this data from access by other companions.

But, when blockchain nodes are run as a managed cloud service with users only able to access them through the APIs and event subscriptions, data privacy can be maintained to a great extend.

Blockchain Interoperability

Although they are various enterprise blockchain platforms, interoperability is a pertinent issue to which Blockchain developers are looking for mass adoption. The basic idea is to join one particular platform and to utilize the service on another enterprise platform if required without any severe compatibility problems.

Therefore, developers are finding a way through which users of different software can interact and conduct meaningful business.

Performance

In the blockchain network, the performance requirement is never the same. It varies from one scenario to the other. Like for example, the performance metrics include throughput and latency, and outcomes will vary in terms of network size and hardware configurations, and the tradeoffs between higher throughput versus lower latency.

Thus, based on the deep understanding of the business demands and platform architecture, a reasonable performance optimization solution needs to be adopted.

This is not the end of the list. Moreover, a lack of regulatory clarity is one of the significant implementation issues. Many governments are still unsure about how they consider this technology from a legal standpoint, and this leads to complexity.

Conclusion

Enterprise blockchain is gaining popularity and adoption in almost all sectors and for different use cases. Although blockchain might seem to be offering several advantages to the industries, it needs to be re-architected depending on various use cases for greater acceptance of enterprise blockchain in the mainstream.

The buzz around blockchain probably won’t subside, so hurry up and upgrade your skills now with the best online Blockchain certification courses.

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online blockchain certifications and become a blockchain expert, check the online opportunities which deals with all levels – beginner, intermediate and professional learning.

Free online career skills training launched on National Career Service portal

The Ministry of Labour and Employment under its National Career Service (NCS) project has now started offering free online “Career Skills Training” in partnership with TCS ION for its registered job-seekers. This course on soft skills assists the learners in enhancing personality development with modules on corporate etiquette, improving inter personal skills, making impactful presentation including other necessary soft skills demanded by the industry today. The training module is available in Hindi and English on the NCS portal.

The Ministry is implementing the NCS Project for transformation of the National Employment Service to provide a variety of employment related services like job search, job matching, career counselling, vocational guidance, information on skill development courses, apprenticeship, internships etc through an on-line portal (www.ncs.gov.in). There are around 1 crore active job seekers and 54 thousand active employers registered on NCS and around 73 lakh vacancies have been mobilized through the portal so far. Around 1000 employment exchanges including 200 Model Career Centers across the country are integrated with NCS.

NCS has also taken a number of other initiatives to mitigate the challenges in the labour market due to COVID-19 and the consequent lockdown of the economy.

Online Job Fairs are being organized to bridge the gap between job aspirants and employers where the complete cycle from job posting to selection of candidate can be completed on the portal. Around 76 Online Job Fairs have been conducted by NCS during the lockdown Period.

A Special link for Work from Home Jobs and Online Trainings has been created on NCS portal Home Page to give direct access to job-seekers to such jobs.

NCS also offers the functionality of creation of video profiles for job-seekers in partnership with HIREMEE, a platform which provides online assessment and hiring services. Job-seekers can showcase their ability to recruiters using short video clips. All services on NCS are free.