This IS Your Dream Job

Job description

Here are two questions to ask yourself: 1) when are you most content? (Not ‘happy’ per se, since happy moments are fleeting. 2) Does contentment ever happen for you during the workday? The average American worker spends 2080 hours per year on paid work. Over 30 years, that adds up to 62,400 hours. That’s a LOT of time to spend doing something you don’t like doing. Research also shows that people will change careers at least 7 times during their lifetime. However, career changes aren’t always drastic – you can change the focus of your daily work activity without changing jobs. Sometimes incremental shifts—small changes in what you do and how you do it—are the best and most satisfying way to land that dream job The key is to concentrate on ways to shift paid job duties into activities that give you that feeling of contentment. Grab a Sheet Of Paper And a Pencil—or Open Up Your Favorite Word Processor And Work Through The Following Steps To Come Up With Your Own Action Plan To Realize Your Dream Job STEP 1: Think about your current job – make a list of the tasks that comprise your job. Highlight the ones you most enjoy performing in your job. Note the ones you can’t stand STEP 2: Make a list of activities you’ve done in the past that you are most proud of, and that you got the most satisfaction from. These can come from previous jobs, volunteer activities, school work, or hobbies. If you loved laying out the college newspaper, but hated the organizational aspects such as chasing people down to get their content in on time, then that tells you something about the types of activities that work for you. STEP 3: Envision your ideal job – and list the tasks that it would encompass. What basic skills involved in your ideal job could start working on today? This could be something simple – if your ideal job is to be in charge of all written communication for your organization, an area you could start working on immediately is your writing skills. Even if your current writing skills are pretty good, there is always room to work towards a higher level of achievement. STEP 4: Now take the list of tasks and activities from steps 1 & 2 above, along with the list of skills from step 3, and group them into functions related to your job that you could concentrate on. (For example, if you are a financial analyst, but you find the grind of financial…